I felt similarly about my MythTV setup at the time. It was quite a pain to set up, having to acquire a TV decoder with hardware compression to make reasonable

I felt similarly about my MythTV setup at the time. It was quite a pain to set up, having to acquire a TV decoder with hardware compression to make reasonable use of disk space without losing frames on the 400mhz boxes of the day. MySQL database, TV programming service subscription, IR remote receiver, etc. But the commercial skipping used a set of a dozen filters for things like black screens, volume changes, logos in the corner, and bayesian analysis to nail every single commercial transition. It was flawless.