From weaknees.com, a site that offers a bunch of Tivo related upgrades and accessories, a tip that save your eyes and your thumb:
Every TiVo can do a 30 second skip – you just have to enable it.
Here’s how you do it:
- Start playing any recording.
- During playback press:
Select – Play – Select – 3 – 0 – Select- You should hear three bongs (if you don’t have the TiVo sounds disabled), and you’re done.
Your “skip to beginning/end” button (the arrow pointing to a line)
is now a 30 second skip button. During fast-forwarding or rewinding,
the button will still “skip to tick.”
For the most part you can press the skip button about 4x’s and you’ll be reasonably close to the next segment. I’m not sure what the usual commercial break is, but in the short amount of testing I did, it was anywhere from 2 minutes to 2.5 minutes.
Before I try the 30-second skip, is there a way to switch it back to the default in case I decide I don’t want the 30-second skip?
according to the weaknees.com site, it gets reset to the default every time you restart Tivo… so just turn your Tivo off (ie: pull the power cord) and it will reset.
AJ
Love this hack. Even better when used in conjunction with the Instant Replay (8-second backward skip) button!
(Instant Replay isn’t a hack, but I for one had no idea it was there until long after I had enabled the 30 second skip.)
Also, if you press Skip while you’re fast forwarding, you get the original behavior (i.e. jumping to the next little hash mark).