-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Bill Stewart writes:
Blocking commercials would be fun, but would probably be illegal :-), or at least stations that supported it would have trouble getting advertisers.
Actually, there was a story in the San Jose Mercury News a couple of weeks ago regarding a product that does just that. VCRs from at least two manufacturers will contain a chip and/or firmware that detects commercials and does not record them. My dim memories from a project I did for Sony a couple of years ago are that commercials are separated by a fixed number of black frames and some, at least, have tracking information encoded so that advertisers can monitor how often they are played. I'll try to dig up more info. Regards, Patrick May -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMB16QO5Yg08fDKehAQHcgAP/c9OCy/jIKXdjDPjfifPHfK9tqRO8EWNY cAoPH418Otur0jaORTEoyuMwcuZcApm4yzsF+5teLi2p+y/BhAPNH9dSMLNGnVuQ GUkvKJIHapYyR8dlY+d2AsJWOi3jBCTTt1Spog+3uGcx5ry8ROK91Xr3XUNntcyG w2bG06dL44c= =KY6i -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----