Video player with "commercial skip" buttons

[wmm]

Is there a video player with on-screen buttons that skip ahead/back in the program a fixed amount (extra credit if the amount of the skip is programmable, especially if the forward and backward amounts can be set to different values)?

I currently use VPlayer and like nearly everything about it; it handles all the formats that I ever need, and I like being able to set the brightness independently of the system setting. The one thing I don't like is that skipping forward or backward is done by sliding across the top of the screen during playback, with the amount of time skipped being proportional to the length of the slide. I mainly watch broadcast TV shows that I have recorded off the air, with included commercials, and using that UI to skip over the commercials to the next segment of the program involves a lot of fiddling back and forth.

The video player I used on Windows Mobile before switching to Android had buttons that could be programmed to skip a fixed length forward and backward, which made it really easy: I had the forward button set to 60 seconds and the backward button set to 10 seconds, so I just hit "forward" until I was in the next program segment, then "back" until I was just on the tail end of the last preceding commercial. It only took about five seconds to skip over the commercial break, and I never had to watch more than 10 seconds of the last commercial.

I wrote to the developer of VPlayer with that suggestion, but he hasn't seen fit to incorporate it into the product. Is there a video player for Android that can do this? I tried out MoboPlayer, but it has a variant of the slide-forward-or-back UI as well.

 

[Usta]

I think a few players can do that.
For example, in MoboPlayer if you go to the settings and set a Seek Interval like 20 second, then while playing the video you can simply tap the forward button and it will jump forward 20sec.

 

[wmm]

Thanks for the suggestion. I gave MoboPlayer a try, but it seems to be really buggy. For one thing, when I tried to set the media directory and hit the "Confirm" command in the menu, it popped up a little window saying that it was generating thumbnails, but it never finished (it always said "Number of media files added: 0"); hitting "Close" in that window aborted the operation and plopped me back in the opening screen.

More relevantly, the "forward" operation doesn't work reliably. I set the interval to 60 seconds, and whenever I hit "forward" it would jump immediately to the end of the hour-long video and pop back to the directory listing. I set it to 10 seconds, and it would move 10 seconds forward or backward, but only once or twice: if I hit the button repeatedly, as I would to skip over a commercial, once again it would jump to the end of the video and quit playing.

(I mentioned in my original message that I had tried MoboPlayer; I didn't realize that it had the skip forward and backward buttons because the initial help screen that pops up just describes the horizontal slide gesture to set the play point, so I figured that was the only way to do it.)

 

[Usta]

Hmm. The thumbs generating process went fine on my Desire.
Regarding the buggy forward jump, I'm thinking it may depend on the video you are using (codec, container, format, audio properties).

Anyway, you can try another player that also has this feature - VitalPlayer.
See how that one reacts to jump touches.

 

[wmm]

Probably both problems with MoboPlayer are the result of the video format (all the files I tried it with are the same format).

VitalPlayer seems pretty good, except that turning up the brightness setting causes the image to get really washed out. I might put up with that, though, given that the forward/back functionality mostly seems to work (after I hit back a few times, the image froze, although the audio continued; hitting forward, though, resynced things). Thanks for the recommendation. (Wish it had separate values for forward and backward skip, though, but at least the buttons work.)