I finally decided to purchase my first Window’s PC in a long, long, long time. In fact, I had not purchased a complete system since the early 90s. In 1992, I bought a 486 system and then proceeded to upgrade that for nearly a decade.

Then I decided to switch to a Mac. I had used Macs in the past, but had never owned one. They seemed like adequate machines, but they were out of my price range. A few years ago, I started working with Intuit and they required Mac support, so the company I worked for purchased an iMac for me. It was a first generation iMac with the CRT. I liked what I experienced and decided if I could use that machine for 30 days, I would buy one. And I did. I bought a PowerMac G4. It had two processors and was quite nice. The build quality was excellent.

Since that first purchase, I have owned numerous Macs. So, recently I decided to sell a couple. I had two Minis, one G4 and one Dual Core Intel. I sold those and wanted to purchase another computer. However, the Apple tower systems are generally very expensive. So, I decided to go with a PC. Originally, I was going to buy a bare bones kit and build it, but I found a great deal on a Dell system.

And so, here’s the specs on the Dell Studio XPS:
2.66 GHz Core i7 processor (Quad core, Hyperthreading enabled)
750 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
ATI 4850 512MB RAM
Vista 64-Bit.

I added a 1.5 TB Seagate drive.

So, I started looking around on how to set this machine up with Mac OS X. I found some information on the InsanelyMac forums. And away I went. First, I went through a number of Hackintosh distributions, but iAtkos 5 worked the best. Some had issues booting on my system.

I was able to get my system up and running with a lot of work. Eventually, I was able to get everything working except sound. I am still working on that one.

I recently began using my EyeTV Hybrid again. El Gato released a new version of EyeTV. It allows programs to be shared over the web after they have been recorded.

EyeTV is nice. It has an editing feature for removing commercials. Removing commercials via this tool is tedious, at best. I could not bring myself to edit the programs to remove commercials. To me, it didn't seem worth the effort.

I know there are TV shows on the internet that have no commercials. I couldn't imagine that people are editing them all by hand, so I started searching.

I found some stuff, like ComSkip, but it is windows based. I found another solution, but there's a lot of moving parts. I may consider it in the future. This solution uses X11, ffmpeg, mplayer, and ComSkip. It is an automated solution but has a few moving parts. I may try to rework this in a bit.

I found a native version of ComSkip for the Mac. ETV-ComSkip can be used to skip commercials while you are watching a program. However, in it's process, it will actually mark the commercials. So, now I have an easy way to mark the commercials so they are easy to remove.

You have to quit EyeTV for it to mark the commercials. Evidently, EyeTV will overwrite the editing tags. So, you quit EyeTV after running 'FileWatcher all' from the command line. It is in the FileWatcher.app package. This will mark all the commercials.

After this process, you simply edit each program. The markers will be set. Compress them and the commercials are removed. You can then compress the programs for viewing on an iPod or iPhone. Or, in my case, the Web.

Simple as that.

Tags: EyeTV, ComSkip