Similar to how YouTube videos can be sped up or slowed down (in the player settings… 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, etc) the ability to change the playback speed of Tablo recordings while watching them would be awesome. There are times when I would love to save 10 minutes of my life by speeding up things like the nightly news.
I realize this would be technically challenging for multiple reasons, but it can’t be impossible. A more granular selection than steps of 25% would be preferable though, such as increments of 10% from 50 to 150 or maybe all the way to 200% depending on the technical limitations.
It appears to be player specific. I concatenate a URL in the form (tablo.lan is specific to my network and 0000 is the recID of a show to stream, I use capto for this, and it’s mostly assembled in a shell script) http://tablo.lan:18080/pvr/0000/pl/playlist.m3u8
I used smplayer for playing videos, it handles streaming via a URL, vlc or most any player you choose.
I clicked double speed and half speed. Played either without issue. Presuming network speed or buffering isn’t a problem HLS doesn’t care how you play it back.
I think most requests have wanted variable bit rates that adjust to various WiFi/ethernet speed conditions.
I can use 1x,2x, and 3x fast forward with thumbnails to move through the video. And most TV is rather bad. So do I really want to play the video at half speed and spend twice as much time watching Hazel or Maude. Life is short enough.
My interest was more in increasing the playback speed a little to save time, not in slowing it down. I just mentioned reduction because I figured if one was possible, both probably would be.
I was just referencing on the possibility, questioned in your previous post. Me, I have little to no reason for it, others may.
adaptive bitrate streaming? From what little I (kind of) know, you need multiple bitrates sources. I would speculate this is substantial overhead, outside the scope of tablo’s goals.
Accelerated playback with sound is useful for something like catching up on a news or sports talk program. You can get all the news with the cute little chipmunk voices in half the time.
I just opened a program stream directly from the Tablo on the VLC media player. It supported a 4x speed increase with sound, and a 7x increase with no sound. Above 7x, it was no longer a fast video but like a thumbnail jump. The audio was too fast to understand above 2x. It would slow to 0.03x, with no audio below 0.2x. It would also do a frame by frame advance.
great! Back to the original post, from what I’ve discovered here, with tablo out-of-the-box, it’s marketed to the “general” public to be as user friendly-est while compatible with multiple devices. So it seems they keep it relatively simple in some respects.
Seems there are a lot of things we can work around, like adjust start/end times, vary play speed, swap disks, which seem simple to some users, but can be too much for others.
If playback seed were critical for me, I would use ffmpeg to encode an mp4 and use my own player to watch at what speed brought me happiness… but that’s me, I’m not like everyone else.
Since tablo uses the video player that comes on various streaming clients (Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, android TV,etc.) maybe you need to investigate these players and prod these suppliers along.
Or for Plex you might find it’s not that high on it’s list of user requested features.
I don’t quite understand why you seem to be on a mission to criticize another person’s request. If Tablo found a way to implement it, I’m sure nobody would force you to use it, and you could continue living your life as you please.
Is the Roku implementation language BrightScript using Roku API’s. If your product is limited by any number of barriers why would you expect tablo to spend R&D money trying to defeat these barriers.
Usually what would happen is that all Roku users, not just tablo users, would demand that it be changed.
And as an example I included the user Plex wish list that shows that on other platforms this feature ranks in the middle.
I tend to agree, it’s player dependent upon each platform - tablo had little to no control on player specifics embed in it’s “apps”. But zippy if
this is your logic, how do you sort #feature-requests to get commercial-skip to be a priority of user requested features? clicking on Top none of the options put it near the top… it’s a marketing priority I suspect.
I have no use for it, so I see it as useless… that’s not saying it’s a dumb idea. Who told you you can’t vary playback speed?, it is player dependent.
If you use tablo’s web based app in Firefox > bring up the context menu (aka right-click) and select Play Speed> Options range from .5 slower to 2x faster. So the possibility has existed!
Companies often spend R&D money to develop product features that give their product the appearance of having a feature set as complete and/or more extensive as their competition. Even though these features could have little usage.
Some features are developed just because the competiton has a marketing effort targeting some feature your product doesn’t have.
Don’t most products have a scoreboard checkbox list of features they have versus the competition.
And what the last user requested was a chirpless fast forward allowing for listening to the audio? Each video player would have to provide this capability.
I agree, considering the amount spent on R&D, marketing, analytical data mining… user input is probably low priority in the mix. People feel good “having a voice”. and if their “idea” happens to be what ever is coming out next - oh boy! they listened to me,and fixed my problem! (rarity)
In a corporate world, current users already contributed to the profits. Corporations need to find new buyers before making ones that already paid happy. Sadly that’s just business. Not to say current users are unimportant or neglected.
I agree, this would be an incredibly valuable feature. A lot of video players are starting to include this as standard. I did discover that the chrome plugin “Video Speed Control” works with Tablo if you watch a show from your system via the Chrome browser. So that’s nice – but I’d love to see it implemented on the Roku app.
