# Faster fast forward



## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

The Tivo needs a faster fast forward. 

It's not that fast when increments are 15 minutes.

And then 30 minute hash marks? It is a painful in a 1st world kind of unnecessary way.

Maybe just me venting the past few days after watching select parts of long sporting events.


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## HomieG (Feb 17, 2003)

trip1eX said:


> The Tivo needs a faster fast forward.
> 
> It's not that fast when increments are 15 minutes.
> 
> ...


While fast forwarding a recorded show, hit the skip button on the remote. The should advance to the next 15 minute hash/tick mark essentially immediately. Do it again to go the next 15 minute mark after that. Also works, in reverse, with rewinding. Works only on previously recorded shows, at least on my S3. Enjoy!


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

HomieG said:


> While fast forwarding a recorded show, hit the skip button on the remote. The should advance to the next 15 minute hash/tick mark essentially immediately. Do it again to go the next 15 minute mark after that. Also works, in reverse, with rewinding. Works only on previously recorded shows, at least on my S3. Enjoy!


Yeah i'm talking fast forwarding in between the increments.


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## Nak (Aug 18, 2010)

Well, at least you'll be able to watch on your 5" screen.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

The third FF is technically suppose to be 60x, meaning that 15 minutes of video should only take bout 15 seconds to FF through. The problem is that with HD/digital TiVo has no control over the structure of the encoding. With the old S2 units this was flawless because they controlled the encoding and could insert an I frame every 1/2 second. They also retained metadata with the byte offsets of every I frame to make them really easy to seek to.

With HD, and digital SD, the encoding is handled my the cable company and can vary wildly from channel to channel and system to system. And getting a smooth FF from a stream with a variable GOP length, which a lot of cable channels use, is very difficult.

What most FF routines do for unknown GOP structures is they just set the decoder to only decode I frames and then display 1-2 per second. This makes the actual speed vary depending on the GOP structure of the program. If there is one every 1/2 second then it would be 60x, just like the S2, but if there is only one per second then it's half that. And if the GOP length is variable then it's really not smooth at all and will look jerky and jumpy. I'm not sure if this is how TiVo does it, but if it is then the speed of the third FF is likely as fast as it gets.


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## tomhorsley (Jul 22, 2010)

Yep. I've noticed that some channels FF better than others, so it really depends on the way they are encoding things.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

I didn't think it could get worse until I recorded the USopen the other week and had 1 hr increments to fF through. 

I wish they had a way to skip ahead in 5 minute increments. WMC had that. It would keep playing what was playing but then the timeline at the bottom would show a thumbnail and would skip ahead 5 minutes every 2 sec or so. Enough time to stop it at any point you wanted to skip to.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

You should try enabling real 30 second skip and see if that works better for you. Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. You'll hear 3 dings if it took.


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