Are there any clients that have iframes during trick play? (thumbnails during fast forward)

[dmphx]

Hey there.

Basically title. More info if you want it though

Really enjoying channels. Coming from someone that bought a tivo the day they were on shelves, I'm as close to as over the moon now as I was then in terms of QOL upgrades over what I was doing before.

House is mostly Roku's - so I've been running a client on the mac mini that I use as a server for one room and an old firestick in the other.

Everything is fine with this set up, but I do miss having iframes/thumbnail previews on manual fast forward (for the rare times I want to navigate without relying on comskip).

This often is different between clients more-so than the server and fire devices, IME, are always spotty in this regard.

Are there any clients where the expected behavior would be for the iframe/thumbnails to be visible during FF/RW?

[jkr4m3r]

I use Emby for Movies and use the thumbnail feature only for movies there because it's quite heavy on resources to create the .bif files for the thumbs.

This would be an awesome feature for Channels DVR if performance wasn't an issue as it is with Emby.

[edit] This might be good for a feature request, I'd like to see the devs here work their magic on creating the bif files for thumbnails instead of comskip.

[jasonmcroy]

I know this isn't the thumbnails you speak of exactly, but on the Apple TV and the Shield device each time I skip forward manually the whole still image on the screen changes to the frame that I skip to. When I used to use Emby or Plex they never did that unless I used their thumbnail image creator thingy.

I've never used a Roku or Firestick so I've no experience there.

This may not be what you're looking for, but both those devices have always skipped forward with the full image for me on both movies and TV Shows.

[dmphx]

Thanks jason,
That's certainly A-OK with me. Any visual indicator of the action on screen during trickplay is really all I'm looking for, size is irrelevant.

Plex/Emby thumbnails are also fine (I use plex extensively and have played with sharing my channels library to plex so it can index and create thumbnails) and it does mostly work. But there are scenarios that it doesn't work well for. Or timing issues where it's simply not possible. For instance for live sports that I'm watching with a delayed start - one of my very specific use cases that really could use this kind of thing - I'm often starting what will be a 3-4 hour broadcast an hour or so in. Which I think is a semi routine move by a lot of DVR users.

I've been thinking about the new apple tv now that it's out. Maybe I'll give that a look and see how it does. Certainly love the ad-free interface. Which I suppose follows given the nature of the topic!

jkr: agreed. Would be an interesting one on the channels side. I'd imagine they would put this back on the clients though, but maybe....

edit: type now that's it out, as opposed to not that's it our re: AV4K+