Over on Lifehacker.com I found a link to a very cool program called Lifextender. Lifextender automatically removes ads from your Vista Media Center recordings. The tongue and cheek description they gave:

Because your 30-minute TV shows will now be around 22 minutes long, saving you around 15 minutes for every hour you watch TV, you'll notice that you have a lot more free time. This gives the illusion that your life is being extended... kidding.

Now that is just plain funny. What's even better is that the application works really well. I have about 60-70 shows recorded both in HiDef and Analog. I set it up to run at 1am every night and went to bed. The next day I checked and virtually all my shows were converted. A few were not, but I'm guessing that was due to some timeout or another and not due to any application exception.

One of the cool things it does is once the commercials have been removed it replaces the original show with the new, shorter version. You might want to watch the Super Bowl live if you enjoy the ads, because they will be gone if you aren't careful!

I've been waiting for something like this for a really long time. I've tried a number of other utilities and apps that do the same thing, but they all involved some long drawn out manual process. The fact that I can set this thing up, configure it, and have it run in less than 10 minutes, and it works is outstanding.