Hello Fire TV Developer Team,
I am using a high-end Panasonic Smart TV running Fire OS 8. While I highly appreciate the system performance, there is a major limitation regarding local media playback and DVR recordings that standard, much cheaper TVs or basic media players (like VLC) do not have.
Issue:
Visual Trick Play (Thumbnail Seeking / Timeline Previews while fast-forwarding or rewinding) is completely unavailable for locally connected USB media (own movies) and standard DVR/PVR recordings. It only works for commercial streaming apps that fetch pre-generated thumbnails from a server.
Why this is a flaw:
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No Performance Bottleneck: The TV hardware and modern high-speed USB drives are more than capable of rendering local previews on the fly.
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No Legal Restrictions: This occurs on DRM-free personal movies and standard SD-resolution television recordings where no copyright flags block seeking.
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Poor User Experience: Standard low-end media players and third-party apps like VLC can easily generate live seeking previews from local storage. Fire OS completely lacks this on a system level for local files.
Requested Solution:
Please implement native, on-the-fly thumbnail generation (Visual Trick Play) for the built-in media player and DVR components in Fire OS so that local USB storage and personal recordings benefit from the same fluid navigation as streaming apps.
Thank you.