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Automatic commercial skipping is a go for Media Center in Windows 7
There were plenty of people upset -- including us -- when they discovered that they could no longer automatically skip commercials after upgrading their Vista Media Center with the TV Pack. Well we're very pleased to let you know that our assertion that Microsoft broke our favorite third party application on purposed, was unfounded. You see we recently got the word from the developer behind DVRMSToolBox that the Windows 7 Media Center SDK was in hand and that it won't be long before we'll be able to can skip commercials without ever picking up the remote -- nice.
It's time to speak up for automatic commercial skipping in Media Center
Although the skeptic in us still kind of believes Microsoft may have intentionally broke automatic commercial skipping in Vista Media Center -- the developer (Andy) of DVRMSToolBox (the most popular commercial skipping software for Media Center) is no longer under NDA and has spoke out about how the TV Pack breaks his software. The long and the short of it is that the Media Center API that notifies the application that video is playing, no longer works. He sees this as a bug, and although Microsoft is aware of the issue, they have no intention of fixing it -- or even publicly admitting it. So according to Andy, our only hope is that enough people report the issue, it may just be enough to make Microsoft stand up and listen.
Did Microsoft intentionally break commercial skipping in Media Center?
When we finally got the Vista Media Center TV Pack in our hands we were so excited about the new found features, that we didn't even get around to trying our favorite plug-ins until later. But after trying our favorite commercial skipping utility, DVRMSToolBox, some of our enthusiasm died. At first we figured, oh we probably need an update, but instead of finding the latest update on the developer's site, we found this interesting post with a inconvenient work around. The wording of the post only prompted us to ask even more questions, and our friends in the beta group had a few things to say. Evidently the developer of DVRMSToolBox was in the beta as well and has been voicing his concerns to Microsoft ever since RC0 was released, and based on the comments in the beta tester's forum, we have reason to believe that Microsoft may have "broken" it on purpose. Regardless of the actual intent though, it seems that Microsoft has no intention of fixing it the SDK in a way that would once again make commercial skipping possible. And in case you're wondering, this affects all the various commercial skipping plug-ins for Media Center, not just DVRMSToolBox.
