Found a post from Feb 2020 stating that scrubbing was only available from the Siri remote or AppleTV remote app from an iPhone, and not from an universal remote. Trying hard to get my family to abandon the DirecTV for Channels+Philo, and the only being able to skip ahead and skip back is making this challenging. Even I have found it frustrating at the end of a show when there is to be a preview of the next episode after a short commercial break. Skipping ahead in 30 second increments using an universal remote usually ends up returning to the menu. I really don't want to reduce the skip forward duration. Being able scrub/scan forward and backwards like a "traditional" DVR / Tivo by pressing fast-forward and rewind buttons from an universal remote would be perfect. Is this currently possible and I am just missing it?
Edit: I should mention that I have enabled the ability to skip commercials. Sometimes the DVR gets it wrong and is another time when scrubbing/scanning would be helpful.
"Scrubbing" is different from standard "fast forwarding and rewinding" and yes, when programmed correctly, every universal remote control I have tried with Channels allows me to do the latter. It's a basic feature that is absolutely included with the software.
The right and left joystick buttons on our universal remotes scrub.
Which remote is that?
Ours happen to be Home Theater Master MX-500's (a long-discontinued model), trained by a GE/Jasco programmable remote. I don't recall what device. But it shouldn't really matter. Any remote that repeats commands when a button is held down should do the same.
I appreciate everyone's feedback. I realized that I programmed the fast forward and rewind buttons on my Harmony remote to perform different actions based on pressing the button vs. holding the button. This is why it wasn't working as expected. When I use the left and right arrows on the remote I get the VCR-style fast forward and rewind functions. That said, the rewind and fast forward appears to move pretty quickly. Still would love to see a slow/faster/fast progression like Tivo.
Sorry, I may have missed the solution here. I got a tivo remote and paired it up to my apple tv. Since there are two different sets of left/right/up/down, wondering if I can enable scrubbing?
No, unfortunately that's not possible with the TiVo remote. It uses Infared, and the only commands available to it are the ones you "taught" the AppleTV when you did the pairing.
I'm looking for a way to program my Harmony remote (with the hub) to allow for scrubbing on my Apple TV similar to how it works on my Apple Remote when I pause and roll my thumb across the pad on the remote. It allows me to jump immediately anywhere in the timeline. Right now, i only have the right and left arrows skipping at 15 sec intervals. The FF and RW buttons are mapped to the same, 15 sec jumps. I didn't know it was possible to program the traditional fast forwarding either. Any tips available?
Unfortunately, that's a limitation of all remotes besides the Apple TV remote. None of them support the swipe gestures of the Apple TV Remote, as they don't have inputs like that.
You can add seek commands to the seek buttons on your remote that will jump to each commercial break, that's a sneaky way to get through the timeline faster.