[mythtv-users] Curious fast forward problem

[Peter Bennett]

On 1/5/21 11:56 AM, mythtv wrote:
> We've been experiencing this weird fast forward behaviour for several 
> versions now. I assume it must just be something we're doing wrong 
> because it's never changed since at least v0.28 and no one else seems 
> to be talking about it.
>
> What happens is this: We have auto-skip commercials turned off. When 
> watching live tv, if we're delayed for more than a few minutes, then 
> hit fast-forward to manually skip thru some commercials, 9 out of 10 
> times, we can skip  thru a few commercials but sometimes it will just 
> jump forward to almost live again (a few seconds behind live).  I hope 
> I explained that correctly.  Its not "consistent" but it happens 
> frequently enough to be a real nuisance, especially when our remote 
> doesn't have numbers allowing us to just jump back a certain number of 
> minutes. And also, the amount jumped is not a consistent amount of 
> time, it always just jumps to near live again.  I believe the backend 
> is marking commercial breaks, and maybe there is some weirdness in 
> trying to jump forward without a correct number of commercial breaks 
> recorded, or some other setting about the length of commercials, etc. 
> I don't quite understand all of those settings, and I don' think I've 
> changed any from the defaults, other than to disable commercial 
> auto-skip.
>
I have noticed this when watching a program that is still recording. As 
you mention, it has been around for a long time. The biggest problem 
with fixing it is that it is so intermittent. In my experience it only 
happens maybe one time out of every 10 programs watched while recording. 
It seems to happen occasionally when I am around 15 minutes before the 
end, on a single skip forward it jumps to the end instead of jumping 1 
minute. It is not related to marking commercial breaks. I believe it is 
something wrong with the way the system keeps track of the increasing 
program size and the amount remaining. If you can identify how to 
reproduce it, maybe we can solve it.