RCA VR557 4-Head VCR
Commercial Advance and Movie Advance make this very cool!
Two features make this attractive for frequent time shifters (timer record and watch later) and frequent tape renters.<br />Commercial Advance works to &quot;eliminate&quot; (kind of) commercials from shows that you tape via  Timer Recording (set manually or via VCR Plus) or via fixed time recording  (start immediately and record for 30 to 240 minutes).  After the recording,  the unit rewinds and marks commercials so that when the user plays back the  tape later, the machine will automatically speed search through those  segments (user can select between a blank blue background and seeing the  speed search during commercial skipping).  This is much nicer than having  to speed through the commercials manually and then having to go back when  you overshoot the ending.  This is not a fixed length skip (it's not just  speeding ahead a couple of minutes), but is reading the commercial signals  embedded in the broadcast, so it will do short commercial breaks as well as  longer ones (great for those cable networks who run long blocks of ads --  e.g. MTV).<br />This feature is so nice that I actually found myself doing  more time-shifting for the convenience and time savings from shorter  commercial breaks.<br />In my initial experiences, the system works very well.  Of my first ten tries, all worked (wide variety of network and cable  programming) with the only failure coming from Jeopardy (though other  syndicated programs work fine).<br />Movie advance works similarly, but allows  the viewer to pop in a prerecorded cassette and skip through all the  previews if desired.  This worked well on the three rentals I've made which  included both movies as well as stand-up comedy.<br />My only negatives on the  machine are that the immediate timed recording feature only goes to 240  minutes (kind of antiquated in an age of 6 hr. tapes and disappointing if  you want to tape the Godfather saga on cable and avoid the ads) and that  the cool lighted remote didn't control my particular brand of TV.<br />For a  low-priced unit, this is very cool! (it also comes on some of the higher  and lower end RCA models, I think).lar brand of TV.<br />For a  low-priced unit, this is very cool! (it also comes on some of the higher  and lower end RCA models, I think).