fast forward of transcoded movies

[novorus]

i used ums for quite a while, it is awesome. I noticed that in case original format is not supported by my client device, i cannot fast forward transcoded version. why is it so? could you provide technical details, please (i am in software development field but not media)?

[Nadahar]

You can find other more in-depth explanations of this on this forum. In short, there are two potential "seek" modes: By byte and by time. Not all renderers support both. When transcoding, by byte isn't possible as the media is generated on-the-fly. Time based seeking is possible though, so renderers that supports that is able to seek while transcoding.

There are more details here though, like whether UMS informs the renderer properly that time-based seeking is available. This is partly configurable, but many renderers simply doesn't implement this which makes seeking impossible.

There is a feature called "chapters" that can be enabled in UMS that is meant to give some compensation for this. It will generate a lot of "fake chapters" at regular time intervals, and you can choose to play any one of these. That way, you are able to start playback approximately where you want even if the renderer doesn't support time based seeking.

[novorus]

thank you for the explanation and for the tip!