I watched some videos with MythTV last night and tested the commercial skip feature. It was flawless! I’d been disabling this feature because the mythcommflag process puts a load on my measly 1 GHz backend server: enough to make the server unsuitable acting both as a backend and a frontend. As long as I’m using a separate frontend, though, things work just fine. The commercial skipping is definitely worth the extra CPU cycles.

I’m still wowed by this tool. What’s really unique about MythTV is the way it slices up what we used to know as television. Tivo, the trailblazing PVR, gave us the ability to treat a television program like a book: you can walk away from the program and “pick it up” the next time you had time to watch.
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