"You can digitally fast forward a whole show and see what you think."Yeah, that reminds me of another trick: Turn on closed-captioning and go into the first fast-forward mode. You watch the show 2-3x faster, but the subtitles still appear, barely slow enough to read. I love watching documentaries that way—it feels sorta like the brain-dump machine from The Matrix. :-)
Turn on closed-captioning and go into the first fast-forward mode. I noticed that when playing with my brother's machine and was impressed that they implemented it. The TIVO unit has to buffer the captioning since it is broadcast at 30 pairs of bytes/second but can only be sent to the set at that same speed. Receipt of readable close captioning data is impossible on a VCR in fast forward mode because many byte-pairs just get dropped.
On that note, a few things I'd like to see in TIVO:
- A mode to suppress captioning except when in fast forward mode or mute mode (if the TiVo is used to mute the audio).
- Built-in caption display. This would allow captions to appear in higher quality (many TV's caption decoders produce hideous-looking captions) and with better timing accuract in fast forward/rewind mode. This would be a software change only, since the TiVo is obviously capable of encoding and decoding captions as well as displaying onscreen text.
- Modes to allow playback at 110%, 120%, and 150% of speed with pitch-corrected audio. I don't know what audio compression methods are used in TiVo, but in many of the high-end formats pitch correction is almost a freebie. While I find it annoying when broadcasters time-compress movies and television shows, being able to do so myself--especially when I'm in a rush--might be handy.