Almost every audio / video playback device and video streaming service provides some sort of fast forward / rewind capability. It’s expected, at least for digital devices if not analog. Been like this from the beginning (not LPs but at least cassette tapes and VCRs and CDs and anything digital).

So when a streaming service doesn’t implement it well, are they just stupid or are they trying to piss off people?

I have a common streaming service that seems like it was bought by or merged with another streaming service. Ever since, I’d press FF/RW and the first press just brings up a scroll bar. The second press does at 10 sec FF/RW but after a few second delay (enough of a delay to make you question if the press registered). And you can’t press multiple times to advance more; you have to press, wait, press, wait.

Is this the best the current crop of coders can do? Can’t wait for these coders to work on the auto pilot cars.

Try holding down the forward or reverse button, instead of just clicking.

A number of streaming services do it this way: A click forward or back does a 10 second increment at a time like you described, but if you hold down forward or back it puts it in traditional FF/RW mode. Then once you put it in FF/RW mode by holding it down, you can usually then speed it up 2x/4x/8x with further clicks.

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:

Is this the best the current crop of coders can do? Can’t wait for these coders to work on the auto pilot cars.

Coding was probably outsourced to the lowest bidder. Probably either offshore, or an H1B visa scam.

It's not all the coders. It's latency too. A tradeoff between seamless viewing and time to first frame and /or forwarded frame. We store video in bundles of 6 2 second segments. We are playing with unbundling the 2 second segments. That would make time to first frame much faster, and FF/RW increments smaller. No one can afford to store all of the video in flash, or cache, so there are some relatively slower object stores involved too. We deal with both streaming and cloud DVR.

The scale of multistate providers will boggle your mind. I have 2.76 Exabytes of SATA disk and trying to calculate network bandwidth puts me on a mobius strip.


Even being in this biz, This OP describes one of my pet peeves too

Then there are quite a few services that disable the scroll bar if you are on the ad-supported tiers.

Very frustrating to try and resume something you started previously only to be hit with the "FF is not available during this program" notice.