As I mentioned before, BeyondTV has a decent plug-in community. One of the best has to be AutoXvid. It’s a plug-in that will automatically scan and cut commercials from your recordings and then convert them to Xvid format. Or, only do one of those tasks. I only have it cut the ads. If I want to compress something, I do it manually with a drag and drop.

There is a configuration file you’ll have to edit it NotePad. Unfortunately the program isn’t sophisticated enough to have a front-end set-up or run through a preference form. But it is not difficult and nothing to be scared about.

I have a large hard drive and record at a high bit rate. An hour of TV ends up at around 2.0 to 2.5 Gigs. Cutting ads brings down the file size by 1/3. Not to mention not having to skip through the ads. I’m a couch potato after all. The ad scanner and cutter does a really great job out of the box. There are a number of options that allow the ad detection to be more or less accurate, but the default set-up has been working pretty good for me.

It’s a must-have for BeyondTV users.