Tivo Hacks. 100 Industrial-strength Tips Tools 2003

Hack 13 Pushing Fast Forward to Eleven

If TiVo's default fast forward is just not fast enough for you, this hack will satisfy your need for speed .

Now you might have made the play bar disappear quickly [Hack #6], but what if your speed desires have not yet been satisfied? Say you want to be able to blaze minutes ahead through a movie in just seconds. Or perhaps you're more the turtle and prefer to crawl forward. This backdoor hack will let you set fast forwarding to just about any speed you prefer.

After you enable backdoors [Hack #8], find yourself at the Search by Title screen and enter:

Enter Enter 1

You should see a Speed1 : prompt (see Figure 1-5), and the record LED on the front of your TiVo should be lit.

Enter your preferred speed. The last two digits of the number must be 00 for an integer-multiple speed. The digits to the left of the 00 indicate how many times faster than normal playing speed the scan is running. 300 (which is 3x) is the default Speed1 scan speed; a value of 1 is super slow motion (0.01x speed).

Set the change into motion by entering:

Enter Enter 1

You will notice the record LED turn itself off.

Of course, TiVo allows you to press up to three times, each time increasing the fast-forward speed by some factor. Set the Speed2 of the second Fast Forward press by entering:

Enter Enter 2

And set Speed3 for the third with:

Enter Enter 3

The same numerical scheme is used for all three Speed X : prompts. The default for the second fast forward is 2000 (or 20x), and 6000 (or 60x) is the default for the third.

TiVo will revert back to default speeds when it is rebooted.