Jere,

As you know when ShowAnalyzer detects commercials in our HD dvr-ms files, there is an error that develops between the SA commercial time and the playback commercial time.

This produces a situation where, during playback, we end up watching a few seconds of the commercial, followed by a skip that skips to far and misses a portion of the show.

The magnitude of the error works out quite accurately to 6 seconds of drift per hour of recorded show for both 720p and 1080i dvr-ms files.

In other words, with a 3 hour movie, by the end of the movie the commercials are out of sync by 18 seconds.

I was thinking about a simple solution to this and experimenting a little...

I discovered that if I look at the commercial time stamps and look at the time for the very last segment by looking at the logs and compare this to the total length of the show according to the dvr-ms file properties that this error shows up here too.

For example if I take a 1 hour HD recording (dvr-ms file) and look at the file properties, it shows that the file is 1 hour in length. When I play it back with Media Center it also ends at exactly 1 hour. When I look at the SA log file, this same file shows an end time stamp of 1 hour, 0 minutes and 6 seconds.

I then opened up the commercial xml file that was created by ShowAnalyzer and multiplied all of the time stamps by 3600/3606 (1 hour divided by 1 hour, 6 seconds) and then watched the show using Media Center and the DVRMSToolbox addin's commercial skipper and PERFECTION!! All of the commercials were now skipped perfectly in sync with the playback.

So, I wanted to suggest as a very simple fix you could incorporate this very simple math into your software and ensure this sort of "time drift" issue is compensated for.