Who doesn’t want to automatically skip commercials (aside from the advertisers)?

Nothing is worse than being at the peak of a show your really into to just be interrupted by the lastest household cleaner or snuggie ad. That’s why this App is one of my favorites. MCE Buddy is an app that sits in your task tray and monitors your Windows Media Center recordings folder for new recordings. Once one is found that’s when the magic begins.

The first thing the app does is scan for commercials and flags them for removal. Once flagged the app then starts transcoding the large MPEG-2 based .DVR-MS or .WTV files into a smaller mp4, h264 or wmv file of your choice with pre-built profiles for many portable players like the psp, ipod, and zune. The transcoding happens as a low priority process to avoid interrupting your work. Leaving you with files you can take on the go without commercials and with more hard drive space on your pc for other recordings. You can even choose up to two transcodes so if you have an ipod and a psp you can leave yourself with some choice. The only limitation this program really has is it can’t (at least last time I checked) process recordings with DRM.

For ipod users with the latest version of iTunes (iTunes 9 as I’m writing this) you can choose the output folder of this app to be the new “Automatically Add to iTunes” folder (~user/my music/itunes/itunes media/automatically add to itunes/). Guess you can figure what that does when you open iTunes.

Hands down this is one of my all time favorite media apps. So simple yet so useful.