When I want to watch something I have DVR'ed, sometimes I see the blue timeline broken up with those short yellow segments that indicate a run of commercials. Yay! So I FF at speed 4 to get through them. I wish more programs had the yellow segments.

On some very recently DVR'ed shows, there are only one or two yellow segments at the beginning of the blue timeline--none for the rest of the program. Is there a rule about not watching soon after DVRing that will give you more yellow segments? If I let the recordings age, will I get the yellow segments all the way throughout the shows, on the shows where the commercial skipping works? And, if so, how long do I have to wait?

Thanks for any insight.

 

Oh, wow, I don't know how you get through life without it. What do you do if two things are on at once that you want to watch? You have a VCR for that?

 

LOL

You do see a solid blue line that tells you how far into the show you are? I always did have that when I hit the down arrow on my remote.

But you don't see the blue line dashed with yellow segments on your TV? I didn't on my old TV, either, but it was VERY very old. When I first saw the yellow segments, I thought, HEY! Everyone else has this cool new feature and they just take it for granted?!?

When you start to fast forward, you get an alert, something like Autostart, to let you know it will zip through the commercials for you. You just tell it how fast to Forward. It knows when to stop. Usually it stops one or one-half Mississippi before the show restarts, so you are reassured you haven't missed anything. Extremely cool.

 

Now that I think about it, what I really use the DVR for is time delaying for my convenience. Except on Sunday when there are so many good PBS shows, I don't have much conflict with two shows playing at once that I want to see.

The advantage of forwarding through commercials is almost always better than watching live TV. Honestly, that alone makes paying for a DVR worth it to me. My Dad, too, got to the point that he just refused to watch live TV. He's the one who convinced me to upgrade, and he was right about how much I would like it.