DisSuggs4u

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge fan of TiVo. (And, for the record, I am talking to the actual TiVo box and service. Not that crappy cable company provided DVR which pales in comparison to an actual TiVo. My official opinion and comparison of such shall have to wait until another post.)

One of the best things about TiVo, other than the ability to “shift time” and watch programs when I want to and not be a slave to the TV schedule, is its ability to skip past commercials. Sure, you can press the fast forward button on either the TiVo or a craptastic cable company DVR to speed through the commercial breaks while watching a recorded program. However, what I am talking about is not only something that cannot be found your normal DVR, other than the handful of ReplayTV owners out there, but also something that I am not sure many existing TiVo users even know about.

This hack works on any TiVo branded box, as far as I can tell. By default, the little “skip” button (which looks like “->|”) under the fast-forward button on the TiVo remote skips ahead in large blocks. If you are watching a recorded program and hit that button, it will skip all the way to the end. The same is true for live TV which has been paused for a set period less than 30-minutes (the length of TiVo’s live TV buffer).

If you are watching a recorded program and want to skip ahead a shorter period of time, such as 15-minutes, then press the fast forward button once and then hit the skip button. Each time you press the skip button, the program will skip ahead to each of the hash marks in the playback time line displayed in 15-minute intervals. Then, press play and TiVo will resume normal playback from that spot.

There is also a “hidden” way to change the function of this button. The secondary skip-during-fast-forward feature will remain unchanged, but the skip-to-the-end functionality is changed to a dramatically better option: skip-30-seconds. To enable this hack, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you are watching live TV.
2. Make sure there are no screen menus such as the playback time line or program information overlay visible.
3. In rapid succession, point your TiVo remote at the TiVo and press the following keys…
   Select > Play > Select > 3 > 0 > Select
4. If you did things correctly, you will hear three “dings” (the “thumbs up” sound) followed by a “dong” (”thumbs down”) and your TiVo will change to channel 30. You can switch back to any other channel if you do not receive any programming on channel 30.

To test the hack, you can either pause live TV and wait a minute or two for the TiVo to cache some content, or you can go into your Now Playing list and select one of your pre-recorded program. From either cached TV or a pre-recorded program, press play to resume playback… then press the skip button. Playback should jump ahead in 30-second increments for each press of the skip button.

Congratulations! You now have the power to skip through commercials entirely and laugh in the face of marketers. Thereby concentrating on what interests you most (your program) and filtering out all the noise. On average, commercial interruptions now last about three seconds. You will still be able to see brief peaks of commercials, but they will soon fade into distant memory once you are back to your program.

I have been using this hack for literally years now and have yet to run into any issues.

The only caveat I have found with this hack is that if the TiVo reboots itself after performing a service update, then the feature is lost temporarily. You have to go back and re-enable the hack again through the keystrokes mentioned above.

And, if you feel guilty about your new power and want to give it up, the steps listed above to enable the feature may also be used to disable it. But… why would you ever want to do that?!?!

I hope you are able to put this hidden feature to good use.

Oh, and one other thing…

If you happen to accidentally skip into your program while using this hack, you can quickly fix it by hitting the replay button (located below the rewind button) a couple of times to go back in 8-second increments.

Enjoy!

[Thank you, TiVo, for helping me take further control of my TV (instead of it controlling me).]