Seems to not be working recently

Has commercial TV discovered a new way to encode when they are going to commercial? I have noticed recently that a lot of commercials are getting by on OTA TV. Still running 2.3. For instance last nights FBI had all commercials in it. I then rand the saved ‘ts’ file again this morning thru version 2.3 and again all commercials were still there. I’ve noticed this on several other programs in the last few weeks. It almost seems that it started with the 1st of the year!

I have had comskip not detecting commercials during “winter storm watch” crawls along the bottom of the screen. Because the text scrolling by at the bottom runs through commercials, the broadcast never “goes to black” between commercials. Election coverage also has this effect as well. Maybe that was it?

They’ve also gotten sneakier with ads where they main show shrinks to a box while another box (bigger, of course) plays the ad. I see this on Late Night with Stephen Colbert lately. They’ll cut to the band playing between guests, shrink it down, and run an add next to it.

Another trick is they will “fade” out of the show and into the commercial without going to black or have a hard cut scene in the stream to detect the change.

And there’s nothing you can do about product placement ads (like the prominently displayed brand name products and logos in a scene).

Thanks for the reply. We are currently getting winter storm warnings so that explains it. Also cut down my Golf watching because of all the frigging commercials, most of them the twin screens. NFL also getting into that scenario. However having read and said all of this I use Tablo OTA hardware and subscribe to their commercial skip add-on. It works 96% of the time. The same programs that MCe isn’t working on their’s is. Wonder what they are doing to make it work thru storm warnings?

What ad-skip are you using with MCEBuddy? I am using comskip. ShowAnalyzer is no longer maintained, and is forever frozen around 2010 (over a decade ago), which was the deal-breaker for me. If SA works for you, then great. It also seems that the only place SA is available is through MCEBuddy. Kudos to @Goose for salvaging the lastest (legally free-to-distribute) version before the author (Jere Jones at defunct DragonGlobal.biz, last seen 2013 on Stack Exchange) disappeared and SA was orphaned circa 2010.

Here is the forum discussion on this question with pros and cons for each:
POLL. Which is better Comskip and Showanalyzer

Here is one person’s SA settings (used with SageTV (now defunct) and he switched to Comskip in 2013):
https://davidvielmetter.com/sagetv/my-showanalyzer-settings/

I’m in the US recording OTA and haven’t bothered to mess with the default comskip settings and the results are “good enough” as-is for me.

no, using comskip.