When Plex announced the ability to skip the intro of TV series within its media server software, that was huge. A topic that stretched back to around 2017 when the idea started lighting up within deep discussions and requests inside the user community.
Plex was able to achieve this by creating audio thumbprints of the data from each episode and then looking for patterns that would ultimately be the intro of that series. This allows the software to display a skip intro button that takes you right back into what you are watching without having to wait it out anymore (like Netflix and some other services out there). Brilliant.
Now, by some use of wizardry, they have also brought the option for commercials as well, for DVR recorded OTA (free over-the-air TV) content. It doesn’t remove commercial content since your DVR is doing the work of recording and who knows what kind of regulations exist for how kosher that would be, but the option to skip the commercials will now become available.
So once again, Plex delivers to its customers with their never-ending efforts to make the product better and listen to the community and what they yearn for.
The new feature rolls out this month and it does require that you are a Plex Pass subscriber. You have to have reasons to justify switching to the paid option after all. The free version of the software is amazing in itself, but you do get an enormous amount of features with a Plex Pass. We always recommend buying into a lifetime subscription as it works out very well to pay once and be set for life (and for what you get, it really is reasonable).
4 Comments
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Sorry James, I am unable to follow your post. 1) “they have also brought the option for commercials” 2) “It doesn’t remove commercial content” 3) “the option to skip the commerials will not become available.” So my reading is: Plex does remove or skip commercials. Please add some links to your source, I’d like to get to the bottom of it.
Hello Fidelia. Plex will not “remove” commercials (they will still be a part of the recorded material), but provides the button/option to simply skip past them like it does intros. The intros are still there, but like Netflix, you can skip them as they come up. The same concept is applied to commercials (on supported platforms at least, as the new option may not roll out to all supported platforms all at once).
Thanks James. Now I understand your message was the commercials are not destructively removed, but the feature will allow commercial skipping. This is great news, because when commercial detection is inaccurate I can manually go back and watch the entire show. Cheers!