A typical 30 minute TV show has between five to ten minutes of advertisements, which means that removing those ads from the video will save between ten to twenty minutes of playtime and storage space per hour.

Life Extender automatically removes TV commercials from recorded videos. The program works as a standalone application, and as a Windows Media Center addin.

The application scans the system for a directory that Media Center saves the recorded TV shows to. If it cannot find it it prompts the user to add the directory manually.

All new TV shows that are discovered by the scan are analyzed and scanned for commercials. The program then removes the commercials from each show which usually reduces the file size to three quarters, and replaces the original video with the ad-free version.

Lifextender by default uses the free mpeg commercial detector Comskip to detect commercials in the videos. The application furthermore supports the commercial Show Analyzer, which needs to be purchased before it can be integrated into the software program.

The recording is analyzed on various characteristics such as black frames, silences and changes in aspect ratio. Based on this information Comskip segments the recording in blocks and using heuristics, together with additional information such as the presence of logo, the scene change rate, Close Captioning information and other information sources Comskip tries to determine what blocks of the recording are to be characterized as commercials.

Lifextender has not been updated in the last two years. It still works in most cases, but lacks support for new formats like .wtv. The program is however compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

The processing speed per video depends largely on the computer’s resources. Expect five minutes or less per 30 minute TV show on most modern computer systems.

The program offers several comfortable options, like scheduling scans of the recorded video directory, blacklisting videos that should not be processed, including videos from other directories in the scan, and the ability to cleanup partially recorded and duplicate TV shows.

Lifextender is available for download at the project website. The program works surprisingly well considering its age. (via Instant Fundas)

DVRMSToolbox is an advanced alternative that is still actively developed.

Stream Transport is a new software program for the Windows operating system that can download tv shows from Hulu – and other online video services such as Youtube, Veoh or Dailymotion,

Stream Transport includes a basic web browser (most likely using the Internet Explorer engine) that can be used to open video portals like Hulu in its interface. It will automatically recognize a tv show stream when one is opened and played in the web browser. The streams that are discovered are displayed at the bottom of the interface.

All it takes to download one is to select a tv show from the listing and to click on the Download button afterwards. Each tv show that is found will be listed with its title, duration and video height and width to make the identification easier.

• Widely support for overwhelming online videos – The app is able to browse and download video clips from video hosting websites of HTTP, RTMP, RTMPT, RTMPE, RTMPTE protocol, and these cover overwhelming majority of websites such as Hulu, Veoh, Boxee, Joost, YouTube, Yahoo Video, CBS, etc.
• Capture URL automatically – The URL of any video clip that is playing will be auto-captured and listed out for your convenience, and you can download it with one click or just ignore it. There is no bother to add URL manually.
• Enrich your A/V collection – This FLV Downloader is capable of downloading almost any video and audio file you can play online so that you can turn numerous online video and audio into your own collection. The videos will be saved as FLV or MP4 format in your media library and a powerful player is inlaid for you to play them back freely.
• Considerate task manager and view log – The task manager lists detailed information of files such as name, size, progress, location etc and allows you to play, stop, delete and convert (full version) the FLV files downloaded. Auto shutdown is available as well. The view log makes it easier to manage your tasks.
• Supported video portals include – Hulu.com, Youtube.com, Google video, Myspace, Yahoo! video, CBS, MTV, Megavideo, Photobucket, Dailymotion, Veoh, Demand Five

Stream Transport is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows. The program can be downloaded from the developer’s website. (via Freeware Genius)

TV Gorge is an online TV viewers dream come true. The service streams episodes of popular English TV shows such as Dexter, Criminal Minds, 24, NCIS or Numb3rs to users from around the world.

Even better s the fact that those tv shows are offered in high quality and do not only offer the latest episodes that have just aired but also previous episodes.

TV Gorge will for instance provide access to all episodes of all seasons of 24, Californication, Dexter, CSI or Fringe. Every episode of every season is available and just a click away from being viewed online. It cannot get more comfortable than that.

The amount of TV series, episodes and seasons is incredible, many will call it the perfect solution for watching tv online.

But is the service legal? It is hard to say as there are virtually no information about the service itself on the website. Hulu and tv.com are listed as a partner on the site which could indicate legality. The service could be legal but it could also not be legal.

This is however not a problem of the user watching the tv shows online. If you are looking for a great place with an enormous amount of tv shows then TV Gorge is the place to be.

Recently, many websites have started to show shows free online but do so in a legal fashion, paying for the shows using advertisements.

Different websites seem to work in different jurisdiction but it is fair to say that a large amount is available to viewers from the United States only. Here are a few resources to watch tv shows online.

South Park Studios famously provided their shows online free of charge because the show’s creators were annoyed of people watching their shows illegally. Unfortunately, South Park Studios is not available in Great Britain; I suspect it is North America only.

Joost, the much hyped IPTV service which recently has recently made the transition from software to web-based, boasts a number of titles, both mainstream and online-only. In the UK, and possibly other countries, titles such as Babylon 5, Peep Show, Shameless and Robot Chicken.

YouTube has recently announced it will start ‘serving full-length TV dinners‘ including shows like Star Trek: The Original Series, MacGyver and Beverly Hills 90210. Unfortunately, this is unavailable in Europe.

Hulu is a site which offers free, ad-supported streaming video of TV shows and films from NBC and FOX, amongst others. This includes shows like The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Family Guy and even The Office! Predictably, this is also only for Americans.

BBC iPlayer is a free streaming video service kindly provided to people in the United Kingdom. iPlayer allows Brits to watch most shows broadcasted on a BBC channel in the past week on-demand. The BBC even admits that iPlayer technically does not require a licence fee, a type of tax which any British person with a TV set pays to help support the non-commercial BBC.

Ted, which stands for Torrent Episode Downloader, is probably the easiest way to download tv shows from Bittorrent. The application has been designed specifically for that purpose. It comes with a range of preconfigured shows (more than 100) that are displayed by default. Many popular tv shows are listed including 24, Battlestar Galactica, CSI and Lost among others.

It works like the following. The user picks a show from the list and Ted displays a description of that show along with a list of episodes that are currently available. Episodes are just listed as Season 2, Episode 4 which makes it a bit harder to find out if that is the show that you missed for example unless you want to download a full season.

Next to that is the original air date of that show and the availability on the network. The main advantage of Ted is that it is easy to use with close to zero configuration and has a wide assortment of shows in the list. Custom shows can be added to Ted as well. It does have some shortcomings though which I would like to address.

First of all not all episodes of the tv shows are listed which means that you will miss episodes if you use TED exclusively. If you use another Bittorrent client and Bittorrent websites for downloading those shows you could easily download everything from there right away which would make TED redundant.

There is not a lot of information available when downloading a show which is great for inexperienced users but experts will miss some details that they are used to analyse when downloading from Bittorrent.

According to that email Microsoft adheres to broadcast flags included in the video stream that limits the rights of the users on the receiving end. Windows Media Center users however will not be pleased to hear that software and hardware developers do not have any obligations to interpretate the broadcast flags at all but Microsoft apparently decided to side with the content distributors effectively turning against a part of their customer base.

EFF’s Danny O’Brien commented on the issue in a blog post at the Electronic Frontier Foundation website. (unfortunately slashdotted right now): “They’ve imposed restrictions way beyond what the law requires. Customers need to know who Microsoft is listening to and how that affects their equipment. Right now, the only way customers know what Microsoft has agreed to is when the technology they’ve bought suddenly stops working. Microsoft needs to come clean and tell its customers what deals it has made.’”

It is still unclear if NBC set the broadcast flag to test the waters or if it was an accident that was not supposed to be happening. The most interesting information of the whole incident is the fact that Windows Media Center follows the broadcast flags, that content distributors can regulate what viewers may or may not do with the content stream and that old hardware that was produced before hardware had to be broadcast-flag compliant was not affected at all.

The Adobe Media Player is divided into two key areas. The first are the Genres like Documentary or News that loads a list of shows that can be watched in that category. All the shows are prerecorded so don’t expect to be able to watch tonights shows live in the player.The genres do not contain the shows of the networks, or not all of them which is kinda confusing.

If you want to watch the latest episode of CSI for instance you have to click on networks > CBS > CSI and select the show in that menu. You cannot click on the Entertainment category or Drama (which is not existing) to access the show.

The image quality is surprisingly good and can be compared to that of Hulu, far better than the image quality of Youtube for instance. The interface however feels a little bit sluggish, it always takes a second or so before the next menu is showing up which would be fine for a web application but not for a desktop player.

There is no country restriction currently in place. This means everyone from all over the world may watch the latest episodes of Jericho, CSI or The Hills. You will see advertisement though. The Adobe Media Player will be popular with networks and content creators because of its ad displaying capabilities. It is not limited to in video ads which is a major advantage I guess.

One nice feature is that CBS has added many original Star Trek episodes to the player. If you are a Trekkie you are probably going to love that player. Streams started right away with no delay whatsoever. It surely depends on the Internet connection though and users with slower connections might experience those delays in the beginning until the buffering is sufficient to stream the show.

I won’t be using the Adobe Media Player after this day because it is not offering anything that I would really need. I will closely observe the progress though and make the switch once they add content that is more interesting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice media player but it does not offer anything that the other media players do not offer.

The selection of tv shows is actually pretty good. You get to see Animations like The Simpsons and Family Guy, Crime & Mystery like Bones or Team Knight Rider but also pretty old – but still cool tv shows – like Simon & Simon or Emergency Room. Should be something for everyone, great if you do not know what to do for a certain amount of time.

Users from outside the United States, for example US citizens traveling to Europe or another location, can use the free application Hotspot Shield to view Hulu content even if they are abroad. Check out my article on accessing Hulu – and other services – using Hotspot Shield.

Each tv company that sets up a video portal with the option to download videos is building their own video player. We got NBC Direct and HBO on Broadband for instance, Netflix and Apple of course. That’s four different video players each with its own restrictions. If you want to use all four services you have to install four different clients that basically do the same, they restrict usage.

The messy part begins when you take a look at expiration dates and the like. Do you know when videos that you have downloaded expire in all of these services ? Is there a way to keep track of the dates without having to open all the applications to take a look at all downloaded videos ?

What I mean is that it does not make much sense from a consumer point of view to create one video client per service. The companies on the other hand want full control of the player and their content which is probably the main reason why they do not create cooperations with other companies that basically do the same thing.

I can’t give an answer to the question above, a universal answer I mean. I still say we only need one player but we probably will end up with one player for each company that is entering the market which could be quite a few.

One sector that was a bit neglected until now was documentaries. Best Online Documentaries is a website that tries to change that. They offer nearly 650 documentaries embedded in their website that are hosted on servers like Google Video or Youtube. Viewers can watch the documentaries online on their website.

Several categories like Biographies, History, Science and Mystery and numerous subcategories make it easy to find what you are interested in. All the videos that I tested worked and have a playing time of 40+ minutes. The language is English. Below is one of the videos that you can find on the website. You could really spend several days there.

The amount of tv-shows offered at FanCast is incredible, seems to be more than 100 shows that can be selected. A quick test revealed 11 full episodes of 24, 2 Numb3rs episodes, 7 30-days episodes. The usual amount seems to be between 2-10 for most shows.

Most episodes show advertisements before playing the shows but that is fine I guess, it has to be financed somehow. Resolution is 384 x 288 and the quality of the video is good enough and far superior to those of Youtube. You do get recommendations on the right side of the video and a short description of the video that you are currently viewing.

Update: Fancast has been retired. It is no longer available and will never be available again. Users from the United States can use other – legal – services such as Hulu to watch tv shows online. Users from outside the United States, ex pats for instance, can only watch the shows online when using a virtual private network or another means of using an American IP address.

The second is the website Hulu which is currently invite only and hard to get in. Even if you do you still need to access it from the United States to be able to watch the tv shows. A reader, M.Keezay, told me in the comments that the software Veoh TV would also play NBC Shows free of charge and without country restrictions. (Did I ever tell you, my readers, how much I value your comments and remarks ? They are incredible !)

Veoh TV is a client software comparable to Joost. Once installed the user has to log in, or create an account, and will then be able to watch tv channels in the software. There is NBC with 22 shows including Heroes, My Name is Earl, The Office, Las Vegas, Scrubs and more as well as 154 other channels, most offering similar content that Joost offers.

Not all episodes or seasons are available but you do find five episodes of your favorite tv shows listed and you can opt to watch some or all of them.

Every show begins with a 10-20 second advertisement which is understandable if you consider bandwidth and server costs to run a service like Veoh TV.

Another remarkable channel is CBS which offers additional tv shows like all of the CSI series, Shark, Survivor China, How I met your Mother (the best), Big Bang Theory (even better) and Numbers.

This is probably the best way of watching those tv shows if you do not reside in the United States currently. Great news for every US-American who does not want to miss his favorite tv shows if he is on a trip outside the country.

There are however several catches which really reduce the attractiveness and quality of this new video download service. The service uses DRM, works with Internet Explorer, requires a NBC Direct software to download and view the movies and requires you to have a IP from the United States.

The selection is limited at this time offering episodes from The Office, 30 Rock, Life, Bionic Woman, Friday Night Lights at this time and only the latest episode is available for download at NBC Direct. The service seems to be rather unstable at this moment because my first tries of launching the NBC Direct player ended in an offline (Storefront is offline) notice.

What’s even worse is that there is no way to try to reconnect to the service from within the player and I did not have the impression that the player tried to auto connect to it either. Closing the player and opening it again was the only solution that I could come up with.

It should also be mentioned that downloaded tv episodes will not be in your library forever. You have got two days after hitting the play button for the first time to watch the video which will become defunct after that period.

To sum it up. The pros are that the NBC Direct service is free at the moment. Cons are that it uses DRM, only works with Internet Explorer, requires a proprietary software, offers only five tv shows and only one episode of them at any given time, has connection issues and lets the users watch the tv episodes in a period of 48 hours after pressing play for the first time.

NBC should really take a look at Torrent sites to see how such a service could be created that would be successful.

The interaction is well done and brings back some memories. Make sure you choose the Free Play to just play the shows for fun. I was not sure what the paid version is for and honestly I did not bother looking it up on their website. Blockbuster for instance was fun but the opponent team always got the right answer which is not really what I expected.

Read More:

We Dig TV

Several changes have been introduced to the user interface as well which give Joost a cleaner look. One feature should be mentioned as well. It is now possible to create links to Joost shows and share them with other users.

I did encounter a new bug however. Joost is not showing up when I start the application and what is much worth I’m not able to kill the process tvprunner.exe using the task manager. It consumes 99% of cpu resources and the only thing that is killing it is to restart the computer. Not really practicable.

Deleting the Joost directory in Application Data did not help either which means that my computer running Windows XP is not able to start Joost at the moment.

The shows offered at Joost are still considered B-content by many including me. Unless they really add some high quality content they are doomed to fail even with all the news coverage that they get.

Let me know if you want a Joost invitation and I send it out using Joost on my Windows Vista notebook.

When I heard the figure $4.99 for the first time I was wondering who came up with it. Who at NBC thought that people would actually buy one episode of a tv show for that amount of money ? If you would buy all episodes of a show which usually has about 12-20 in each season you would pay about $60 – $100 for a season which is way more than buying the season on DVD which offers much more value for a lesser price.

The only advantage of the online purchase is the ability to download the episode earlier which is not a huge advantage if you ask me considering the fact that you can watch it on television as well. (tape it there for instance)

I strongly support that every content owner may assign the prices that he likes for his products. Heck, they could raise that amount to $100 if they want. I would not care because I do not buy music or videos online. I don’t like DRM, I don’t like the fact that I have to burn them – if possible – to be able to view them on my television.

I would say that a price of about $10 for a complete season would be nice. That is my price of course and others might disagree. this amount would be my personal maximum for a full season of a tv show – if I would buy them online, that is.

Back to NBC and Apple. It remains to be seen what will happen in the future. My guess is that they will come to an agreement in the end because both probably need each other.

There is practically no way to watch that episode again which would really be awful because it would be hard to follow the storyline of the upcoming episode. Vid2c – and others such as Alluc or Peekvid – provide a way to watch those episodes only by creating lists of commercial videos that are available on video portals such as Youtube, Dailymotion and others.

Vid2c offers a wide variety of links in categories such as TV Shows, Movies, Celebs and Anime as well as high quality TV Show, Movie and Music Video links. Clicking on a category leads to a long list of links that are sorted alphabetically. Usually the more popular tv shows got more links and are more likely to have links to all episodes than not so popular shows.

As you can see in the image they have links to almost 19000 tv episodes, 5000 movies and 5000 music videos plus additional links to Asian movies and Anime videos. Some episodes however are divided into several parts which means that 19000 is not the absolute number of tv episodes.

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Vid2c Homepage
Alluc Homepage
Peekvid Homepage
via Digital Alchemy

All popular shows like Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, Star Gate, Star Trek, Desperate Housewives, The Sopranos, Criminal Minds, Alias and hundreds more are available with most if not all episodes a mouse click away. One little drawback is that several episodes have subtitles in different languages but the main language is English.

All shows load in a small popup and play immediately at least on my connection. All videos are hosted on the usual video hosting websites such as Youtube, Veoh and Dailymotion. Tv Links is updated frequently with new shows and broken episodes get replaced rather quickly, at least that is the case for the most popular shows.

The cartoons and anime categories hold several hundred TV shows. The same can be said for all the other categories. I think the movie categorie is the one that has most broken links of all categories.

Must be because they can be detected by searching for files above a certain file size only.

Most video websites contain the same content with tv shows being the most dominant factor. The mentioned softwares are those well known p2p interfaces that are mainly produced in Asian countries but feature US and European stations as well. It is actually very easy to use them and view live events such as big sport events.

I did not take a look at all the websites that have been mentioned but I would recommend some that have a nice interface or offer the most interesting shows.

• ChannelSurfr -great interface, aggregates videos from sites such as dailymotion and youtube.
• TV-Video.net – offers videos of well known tv shows such as Lost and Heroes.
• WwiTv – Free television stations from around the world

Links are added immediately to the database and everyone will be able to search for and use the links to visit the website and view the video. Page navigation is fast and easy to comprehend. Click on a category like TV-shows and all TV-shows are displayed on the next page. It starts in this case with 15 storey high and 30 rock and ends with young Americans. I would estimate that they currently list about 400-500 tv-shows.

A click on a TV-show itself reveals all the – external – links to that TV-show. Alluc always displays a disclaimer before you can leave the website.

Alluc offers some comfortable options. You can display the latest videos that have been added to a category or display the most viewed ones in a category.