Is there a way to fast forward at 2x/4x/etc using the standard Vero 4K remote? The directional buttons seem to be mapped to the skipping function. Thanks.
You could use the Keymap editor to change that, but it’s not recommended as FF/RW doesn’t work well with Kodi 17 at this time.
We recently swapped out the fast forward and rewind buttons on the bottom of the remote for volume buttons as a result of this.
Sam
Sam, are you on the Kodi developers team? Do you know if they plan to bring fast forwarding back? I can’t see why a useful function like that would be removed.
Regarding the volume buttons, I find those very useful. Ideally, the remote would have both the volume buttons and the fast forward/rewind buttons.
It’s not removed from Kodi, the keymap for the remote was changed. As I suggested you can remap the keys to get FF/RW back, but it just doesn’t work well with Kodi. That may improve with the next release of Kodi, but it’s unknown for sure at this time.
You can also press OK and press the fast forward or rewind buttons during playback.
This implies that they are not giving this function a priority, which is a bit bizarre given how dominant fast forwarding (or seeking) is in video playback. I looked at a few threads on the Kodi forum and confirmed that the devs don’t seem to care about this feature. That’s why I asked if Sam was on the team, in case he had any inside information.
Ah, I didn’t realize those buttons were still there. The overlay icons look like “next chapter” but now I see that there are actually two separate virtual buttons (of different width) in each direction. Strange design choice, but I’m glad it’s still possible to fast forward.
FF/RW have been replaced by skip steps. Much more efficient since the retirement of VHS where FF/RW were necessary.
https://kodi.wiki/view/Skip_steps
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Love the arrogance (and ignorance) of bringing up VHS to show how superior and modern you are. That’s almost as good as the suggestion that skip steps are somehow a replacement for playback at X speed. 
Well, it’s all open source… If you don’t like what the Kodi guys are doing, get into it and submit a commit for this to change. Skipping is working just fine. I feel it’s more intuitive and precise anyway, but that may be my taste. FF/RW are way harder to implement as you have to put way more information over the connection that feeds the video player (for 2x FF it’s 2 times the amount of data, etc. - just think of what kind of network throughput and NAS read speed would be required for an UHD file at max of specs at 8x, 16x or even 32x FF).
If the content is stored locally, it’s easier to implement, like with BD players e.g. For skipping it’s a fixed amount of time that the player has to jump forward or backward and during the short moment it takes until playback resumes, buffering can happen. It’s more straightforward for playback of content delivered over a network connection than FF/RW.
So, don’t see where this discussion could lead. The new remote is an adaptation of what’s fact in Kodi atm - FF/RW is not properly working. Maybe there is a way to make it work again, but it’s not OSMC business. 
No point in even replying to that… BUT: Please keep the forum rules in mind and keep in mind that people are still helping you (in light of how you started here). If there has been any misunderstanding, please refer to the FAQ’s second paragraph again: FAQ - OSMC Forums
“We ask that you keep the discussion here civil and refrain from profanity or abusive language.” If you want help, be nice… 
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Try a Kodi v18 nightly for better FF/RW
Skip steps plus chapters allow easy movement the way most people want.
The one use case I have found for fast forward is when I’m looking for a very specific bit of the video that only appears for less than a few seconds. Usually, it’s things like specific credits, a “freeze-frame” gag, specific character pose, etc. I do this more than the average user, as I am creating fan art, and often need a very exact frame for a screen capture. So, the lack of FF isn’t really a big deal for most people.
I was responding to an inflammatory statement, which added nothing to the discussion and insinuated that people who use fast forward are VHS dinosaurs. We’re not, and the use case for fast-forwarding is real and very common outside the VHS context. Just ask the YouTube development team.
That’s off-topic, but I started here fine. The documentation was missing for my setup, and the support I received threw me off track for a few weeks, but it’s fine now. I am learning the product and using it almost daily.
Understandable that it’s not perfect. To me, even poorly working fast forwarding is better than none.
Using overlay buttons is an acceptable compromise, and I do enjoy dedicated volume buttons on the remote. Hope the Kodi team does bring real fast forwarding back though.
Single frame advance is very, very difficult to do. It’s not trivial to get a single frame out of the AMLogic decoding pipeline.
Sam
That’s kind of a weird limitation. On Windows, I use SMPlayer, which is a GUI that wraps either mplayer or mpv. I use mpv because it does far better with the same hardware. It can do forward and reverse single steps, infinitely variable speed FF/REW, and show two subtitle tracks at the same time (great for foreign language movies with a text commentary).
There was talk that Kodi might start using mpv as the default player, but I don’t know where that went. It is open-source, and there are packages for Debian.
You can do this with software decoding (ffmpeg); but some content won’t play well without hardware acceleration.
Sam
I couldn’t play back UHD on my PC (6-core Sandy Bridge Xeon at 3.2GHz) without stutters with the 32-bit version of mpv, but the 64-bit plays it back very smoothly with 15-20% CPU utilization. I have a really old video card, so it doesn’t help with HEVC decoding.
mpv does support using specialized hardware as a decoder, and then it further massages the output. I think that’s what you really need to look into for the SoC, because a lot of requested features can be implemented if the player gets to tweak the output after hardware decoding. Essentially, feed the output of the hardware decoder to ffmpeg. Non-encode/decode video manipulations are very fast with ffmpeg, even in 4K resolution.
The problem is you lose a lot of performance with this approach.
Instead of offloading to the VPU and having frames put on the OSD; you then have to move it between the VPU, back to the ARM, then back to the OSD.
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Fast scrobbling of long GOP Consumer Delivery Formats like h264/h265 is a pain, especially when data comes over the network.
Even local, GOP formats are problematic. It’s the nature of having one frame being a delta of previous frames until they next keyframe and there is not real key frame index on the usual consumer containers (e.g. M2TS, MKV) - the meta data just isn’t there. It’s designed to be played not scrobbled.
On fast network it would work with DVDs, to some extend on 720p, on 1080p it sucks and on 4K just forget about it. Get used to skip/steps.
It could be improved with way better multi-layer buffering like some BD players do. But again they have the media local! Their implementation would fail over the network was well.
Scrobbling and streaming just don’t work well together on GOP formats with HD and beyond. You need proper fast random access to such a format to make it work properly as users might expect plus some kind of index.
For analog this was never an issue as you could just play a tape faster and kept the helical scan going (just disconnect audio). Not possible digital without a proper format.
And yeah, I get you, chapter locations often suck big time. But you get used to skip steps so fast. it is what it is. Reason: GOP Consumer Formats.
In other Formats you can seamless scrobble as fast as you want. Just take a look at editing software, even they have issues handling GOP formats, whereas with proper intermediate formats you can scrobble 4K like a champ on a Notebook.
I am the first blame Team Kodi. But for sure not here. Improvements possible, but skipping steps is the way to go for HD media and beyond, especially when no fast local access exists.
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I accept the current limitations, but let’s not forget that hardware is continuing to improve at least annually and codec efficiency is growing as well.
Fast forwarding as a feature is here to stay. Watching YouTube at 2x (with sound!) is just too damn fun.