It's good to know what does and doesn't work. I'll give up with "skip commercials" if it doesn't work in the UK. I can't imagine broadcasters wanting to make iteasy for punters to avoid seeing the adverts which pay the broadcasters' bills ;-)
I hadn't realised that Freesat and Freeview didn't use the same EventIDs. I might experiment with using "EPG Running State" on a Freeview-only channel, as an academic exercise and to see whether it works, to satisy my curiosty. Given that my satellite reception is better than my terrestrial reception, I tend to record things that I want to keep on satellite, and this sometimes requires me to force TVH to use satellite (but not terrestrial) or terrestrial (but not satellite), overriding the normal rule of "the earliest recording uses the highest priority service for a channel". So I've created a few sat-only or terr-only versions of channels. I'll try a test recording on a terr-only version of BBC One.
I've never had much confidence in "accurate recording" technology, right back from the days when VHS recorders and analogue TV implemented it as PDC (programme delivery control). Better to record a bit too much either side, than to miss part of a programme - or even the whole programme if the accurate recording technology fails to start recording. I saw an example of that when I was testing this afternoon: the tuner fired up at the correct time (1 minute before published time, because I'd defined 1 min pre/post padding) and the red "recording" dot came on in Digital Video Recorder | Upcoming Recordings as if a recording was being made. But no file was ever created, and although Status | Subscriptions showed the tuner allocated, it was suspicious that only the input data rate was a sensible value; the output data rate remained at zero. That looks like a bit of a bug in TVH: you would tend to believe the red-dot icon.
Fair enough. I've established that the "accurate recording" feature is of limited usefulness. I'm no worse off than I was before. And using VideoReDo to top-n-tail recordings and remove commercials gives
me control: any automated feature is only useful if you can trust and rely on it always to work ;-)