I still have 2 utv's in service. However, I am gradually shifting away from using the utv's to watch the shows - mostly I use the utv for watching sports only, where the 30 second skip still rules, and use my pc to watch the others after doing a capture and ad removal.
For those that might be interested, here's my video processing procedure:
I have developed a somewhat pain free method to capture these onto one of my pc's where I then have a number of scripts that I use to remove commercials. Then I play them back on my laptop connected via s-video to my TV using the vlc media player. The files remain on my desktop PC which serves the files to my laptop using a standard windows file share. These are sent over my linksys wireless network which surprisingly is fast enough. VLC has a nice cropping function so I can get rid of the noise that DTV puts in the first 5 lines of a video (some sort of control info that normally is not seen on a regular TV, but is visible in a captured video file).
What I am thinking about is how to get some sort of DTV dvr that lets me transfer files over my network, since the biggest headache is to capture a show. This, with a utv, takes a full playback time. So, to transfer 1 hour takes an hour to capture, then about 15 minutes to send over my network to my video processing system. Ad removal takes another 10 mintues or so.
My scripts use the video-redo shareware program to transfer the file across my network onto my big desktop machine and cleans up the video a bit during the transfer. Then I run video redo's ad detective, and also run comskip, a free commercial removal program.
I wrote a script that lets me place the output windows (with scenes to delete) from both programs sort of on top of one another so I can see in a flash if they both agree with where the ads are. If they do, I accept the results, which usually work quite well. If they don't agree, it's easy to see and I then do a manual edit pass to fix up any mistakes they make. Usually one or the other of the programs remove the ads quite well.
BTW, the most accurate way to tell where commericals end is that there is almost always now a tv rating block in the first few seconds after a commercial ends. For the beginnings, there's a fade to black which is easy to see by eyeballing it. Both programs are adept at finding the black frames that are there between show and commercials.
Anyway, once you get addicted to watching shows, like heros' or any movies on FX, tbs, AMC, etc. with all the commercials edited out, it makes even the 30 second skip button seem to be a lot of trouble.
But for ease of setting up recordings, I still like the UTV the best. But I can see a day in the future where I will probably go the beyond tv route or some other similar system.