The majority of the PVR projects I've seen use a separate program to actually do the commercial detection. For instance, I use SageTV (a commercial product), and while it doesn't have commercial skip built right in, simply adding the commercial skip plugin will use the txt files created by nearly any commercial skip product to skip commercials.

The one I use (CommSkip), simply runs in the background and creates .txt files with the same name of the video file. SageTV then uses these text files (which include time markers of when a commercial starts and stops) to emulate the commercial skipping. The commercials are still recorded, the time markers just tell the software what to skip when playing it back.

Now, the reason I ask if MythTV actually does the Commercial Skip is because I seem to recall in the directions of CommSkip how to install it into MythTV. This leads me to beleive that Myth isn't actually *doing* the commercial skip, they are utilizing most of the same tools the other PVR software packages are. Perhaps this is an incorrect assumption, but perhaps MythTV is one of the few packages that actually include "a" commercial skip solution with their software, but I don't beleive it is their own (I may be mistaken, so please correct me if I'm wrong).

*** DISCLAIMER: I would read the article if I could (/.ed), so please take that into consideration before retorting with RTFA ***