The Midnight Hour

This summer I built a home theater PC (HTPC) to act as a DVR. I eventually decided on using Windows Media Center (WMC) as the digital video recorder (DVR) interface. Since then I have got it working pretty flawlessly and extended it to two Media Center Extenders (Xbox 360s) via my wired home network. Recently my friend EA tipped me off to a program that would allow me to easily, even automatically, skip commercials in programs recorded in Windows Media Center. The program is located here and is called DVRMS Toolbox. The site contains an easy to find download link for either XP or Vista and even a wiki for common questions and installation instructions.

I first installed the program on my HTPC running Vista Home Premium following the instructions in the wiki. Short story: it didn’t work. This prompted me to do a lot of reading on the site about how the program works and then I started nosing around the options for both DVRMS Toolbox and its companion program: Show Analyzer. I now have it working properly and it’s quite impressive to be playing a recorded TV show in my living room and see it fade out to a commercial and then skip directly to the end of the commercial and fade back into the program I want to see. However, it was not a trivial endeavor to get the program working properly. Below is a summary of what I wish someone had told me before I started installing this awesome program:

-The program works by scanning recorded programs for flags that indicate when commercials start and stop. It writes this information to an XML file. There is an individual XML file stored for every recording you make (that is scanned by the program). This XML file is pretty important. Both DVRMS Toolbox and Show Analyzer must be told where this XML file is located, and they must be pointed to the same place.

-You skip commercials through a cool script that runs in the background of WMC that references this XML file and skips over the portions of recorded programs marked as commercials. This is a little obvious, but not entirely: you can only skip commercials of recorded programs.

In order to use this program successfully (in my limited experience) you must tell WMC to record a program and then choose to watch the program from your “Recorded TV” menu. It’s OK if it’s still recording, but for the commercial skip feature to work you can’t encounter the start of the first commercial during playback until the first commercial has ended in real time. The XML file is apparently updated when commercials begin and end, but if it doesn’t know when a commercial ends then it doesn’t know where to skip to. My recommendation: If you want to watch a live program on a delay and skip the commercials just wait until about 1/2 of the show’s alloted time has passed.

Vista Installtion

Now, the nitty gritty. How does anyone with WMC install this program and start skipping commercials? Unfortunately, that I don’t know. What I do know is how I got it installed and configured correctly. My setup is probably representative of the average Vista user, but I make no claims to be able to troubleshoot your particular installation. Furthermore, I don’t even claim to know much about this program at all. Almost everything I know is captured in this blog post. However, I think revealing the configuration that works for me is bound to help others struggling with installation.

Download the program here.

Extract the file and launch the install wizard.

Read the installation instructions here. It’s a good general guide to follow, but the instructions did not mirror my experience at all. It appears they still list some steps that are now configured automatically, and in my case they also leave out a couple important steps. Below is a paste of the instructions with edits for what I encountered:

1. IMPORTANT: You must first uninstall any previous versions of DVRMS Toolbox.

2. Install DVRMSToolbox

A. Read and accept the EULA
B. Check “Modify Folder Permissions” I didn’t think this was necessary because I was running as an administrator, but I went ahead and checked it and it turned out fine.
C. ShowAnalyzer, DVRMSFileWatcher, and Commercial Skip Add-in are selected by default. Leave them checked.
D. Follow the next 2 screens to select an installation folder and begin the install

3. ShowAnalyzer installation will begin. At the final screen choose to “Launch ShowAnalyzer Configuration”:

A. Select Settings under Global on the left side of the Configure ShowAnalyzer window
B. Scroll down to DVRMS Toolbox
C. Set the When to create option to “When beginning processing”
D. Set the directory (path) directly under this to the following: C:\Users\Public\DvrmsToolbox\CommercialsXml
E. Scroll down to GB-PVR or SageTV
F. Set the “when to create” option to “never”
G. Scroll down and ensure that the “when to create” option for “Mplayer or SageTV” is set to “when beginning processing.”
H. Scroll down to Live Detection Delay; set it to 30.
I. Click on File->Save All to save the settings
J. Close the Configure ShowAnalyzer window

4. Open the DVRMS Toolbox settings from the Start menu. It’s called “DVRMStoMPEGSettings”

A. Click on the “Commercial Skip” tab
B. Ensure the path to the commercial XML files is the same as the path you set in Show Analyzer in step 3.D
C. Check “Auto Skip” if you want to automatically skip commercials (otherwise you’ll need to press a button when the commercial begins).
D. Click the “File Watcher” tab
E. Set “Wait Time (Min) to “1″
F. Ensure that “Watched Directory” is the directory where WMC saves your video files for recorded TV
G. Check “Cleanup XML” so it will delete old XML files of deleted programming
H. I also suggest changing the button on your remote that turns autoskip on and off. By default it is set to the “up” and “down” buttons. I use these buttons to navigate my guide, and this quickly became infuriating. Set it to any button you rarely use.

5. Reboot the machine and start Media Center.

Theoretically, that’s it.  You should be ready to start skipping commercials.  Test it by recording a program and then replaying it to see if all is working as planned.  If it’s not then do some reading on the author’s site and start troubleshooting, but please don’t ask me, because I’ve told you everything I know.