Better than a Recast!

[Roginator]

I've used WMC in Windows 7 for many years. Looking forward to the day it is no longer usable, I got an Amazon Recast. To make sure the Recast worked flawlessly, I got a Google Mesh router. The router was one piece in the puzzle to make WMC far superior to the Recast. The Recast downgrades the picture to a barely acceptable 720p.

Normally I record shows downstairs off cable with an HDHomerun Prime and a separate 2-tuner OTA HDHomerun. I can only get SOME of the OTA signals downstairs. Cable is compressing local channels more and more - making the picture look really awful in some cases.

A while ago I realized I could run WMC on my old computer upstairs using a 2-tuner Hauppauge USB dongle. The problem was, how to get the recorded shows to the main computer downstairs where I watch most TV.

I found I could use task scheduler to run SyncToy every 5 minutes checking for new recorded TV to send over my home network. I thought, "yay!" I was temporarily in nerdvana.

Then I found a flaw. I continued to record the local shows off cable in case something screwed up the OTA recordings. Also, I sometimes want to watch shows live. As was normal in my setup, comskip processed the shows and marked the start and end of commercials. But when I went to watch the beautiful, crisp recordings that had been sent from upstairs, the commercial breaks weren't in the proper spots. The shows from cable were being processed by comskip, but not the ones from upstairs with the same name.

At first I thought maybe I could synchronize the clocks on both computers. But I realized the OTA picture was about 4 seconds shifted from the cable picture.

So I used a batch file in DOS and the task scheduler to slightly modify the file name before sending it downstairs. With a different file name, comskip worked as expected - processing the files from upstairs.

So now I have the best possible picture with commercial skipping sent via wifi without having to run coax cable to my computer downstairs. Better than the Recast! (I still use it for an emergency backup)

[mmatheny]

Why don't you wait to copy them downstairs until AFTER ComSkip runs?