Plex Adds Controversial Commercial Skipping Tech To Its Live TV DVR Service

Plex has confirmed a new feature has been added to its DVR system that cord cutters will really appreciate. The new feature allows the watcher to skip over all the commercials in a TV program and sounds very similar to the Dish AutoHop feature that drew rage and legal action when it debuted back in 2012. Plex's solution to end commercials can completely remove the commercials from the recorded program.

Plex TV is big for cord cutters, but it isn’t eating up all the internet bandwidth in your home. The TV content is captured by an external antenna and the content is recorded via Plex and then fed out to your devices.

That means you can watch free OTA content from broadcast channels in your area like ABC, NBC, Fox, CBS, PBS, CW, and other local broadcasts. This also presumably means that you will be forced to watch in whatever quality your OTA antenna is able to grab, and if you live in a rural area with interference that quality might not be that great.

The commercial skipping feature is available to Plex Pass subscribers. The feature automatically finds the commercials in the recorded content and them before the media is stored in your library. The catch is that the commercial removal process could take a long time and Plex warns it will force high CPU usage. The commercial skipping feature is only offered in beta form right now.

To check out this new feature, you need to set your Update Channel to beta and then grab version 1.10.0.4516 of the software. Once that is installed you will have a "Remove Commercial" option in the Plex Server Settings for Live TV and DVR. Commercial removal works on all platforms except FreeBSD.