Remove ads automatically from your recorded TV
jjones | Guides | 20/04/2009 12:25pm
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The great thing about using Windows Media Center to watch television is that you don’t have to watch the adverts. The 30-second skip button is ideal for whizzing past those annoying commercials, but Windows Media Center is capable of a great deal more than this, thanks to the efforts of third-party developers that have extended the functionality of the program. One of our favourite applications is one that can automatically cut out adverts from recorded TV shows. The application is called Lifextender. It scans through your recorded TV collection one file at a time and removes all the adverts from each video file. It uses clever detection software to work out when an advert break starts and finishes, and then cuts that section and creates a new video file without any adverts in it. Once Lifextender is set up it will do all this in the background without any user input. There are a few addons for Windows Media Center that will do this, but Lifextender is by far the easiest to configure and get working.
Get your life back
The first step is to download the free application from www.lifextender.com. Once the application has downloaded, run the installer and follow the set-up wizard. Once done, you can access Lifextender by right-clicking its icon in the Notification area. The first tab enables you to set some of the general options such as how often you want the application to scan for new TV shows and what you want it do to do with the original recordings. At first we had it set to remove the adverts and put copies of the original recordings (with the adverts intact) into a backup folder, but once we were happy the application was working okay we deleted the original recordings to free up the large amount of disk space they were consuming.
The application also removes duplicate recordings, and removes partly recorded shows if you want it to. There’s also an additional addon that comes with the program that will pop up a dialog in Windows Media Center telling you that a television show has had the adverts removed, and giving you the option of watching it. We found this a bit annoying after a while so we turned it off eventually, leaving the application to run in the background without any interruptions.
Once you’ve played around with the options and finally settled on a configuration that suits your needs, the program then starts scanning your recorded TV and removing the adverts from them. It takes about ten minutes to scan a 30-minute show, so initially it can take some time to scan an entire collection if you have a large one, but once this task has been completed, it knows to only scan and remove adverts from any new recordings you make.
Lifextender is very easy to use and works well. We have no more adverts in our TV recordings. Why not give it a whirl and reclaim those many minutes.
Commercial-free TV!
Use Lifextender to reclaim those wasted minutes
1 INSTALL IT Download the application from www.lifextender.com and start the set-up wizard. Accept the License Agreement, choose the installation location and select Yes to run the application after the installation.
2 SELECT OPTIONS Once the application is installed check the basic settings by right clicking the icon in the Notification area and selecting Options. The General Settings tab shows the Recorded TV folder, which should have automatic selected, based on your Media Center settings.
3 CONSIGN ORIGINALS Lifextender gives you three options: Delete Existing files, which deletes the originals; Recycle, which moves the originals to the Recycle Bin; and Backup, which copies the original files to a backup folder of your choice so if the program removes part of the show that was not an advert you always have the original file.
4 GET NOTIFICATIONS To receive progress messages switch to the Media Center tab, click Install Media Center Addin, and then select Notify me when a TV show has finished uncommercializing.
5 START SCANNING The application will automatically start scanning your entire collection of recorded TV. A dialog displays its progress. If you choose to skip any particular files, Lifextender will remember not to check those files again, which is handy if you have a show recorded from a noncommercial channel and there’s no need to check for adverts.
6 ALWAYS ON Due to Windows Vista’s tight security configuration you must enable the program to run after Windows has started. Click the blocked program notification bubble and select Run the blocked program > Lifextender.
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This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Guides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
