Prime Video Playback Controls

by askeeve

Am I the only one here completely frustrated with Prime's playback controls? You need to use the dpad to navigate to the button you want (play pause forward back) and select them all manually with the center button and to add insult to injury, forward and back are archaic VHS Era fast forward and rewind style? And the thumbnail and progress bar only update like once per second so you have to completely guess how far it's gone between those updates. I always overshoot when I'm trying to scrub to a certain point. It's so frustrating to use! (I recently got a remote with dedicated forward and back buttons so that improves things slightly but it's still a horrific guessing game of how far you've skipped)

And on top of that, if you leave a video paused for more than a minute or two, the whole app just closes. Hulu and YouTube are the best at this, bringing you right back to the paused screen after you dismiss the Screensaver but most others will at least bring you back to the video's details page and let you resume with one click. But for Prime Video, you have to reopen the app, find your video again (at least it's usually still in the "Watch next" section) select it, and then select again that you want to resume, and then usually find it lost your progress forcing you to play with those terrible FFW/RW controls again...

How is this acceptable? I've left them feedback about it but I'm not holding my breath that anybody will ever see it let alone do anything. Then I found out on some other platforms the FFW/RW are more modern skip by 10 seconds type of controls... Why does Amazon hate us?

Waggmans

Yeah, it's terrible and one of the most completely unintuitive apps for video playback out there.

Your only other option is to use the Kodi add on to watch Amazon, but unfortunately it doesn't support 4k playback. Hopefully once Chromecst compatibility becomes available we'll be able to navigate Amazon video using our fingers.

clintonSouthwood

I read a post that stated the Prime Video app is coming to ATV play store for devices other than the Shield soon. It's my hope when this happens the left and right dpad buttons will become more useable and the app will not close so quickly while paused.

As a temporary solution, I've successfully paired a regular Firestick remote and a 4k Firestick remote to my box, both of which have ff/rw buttons and work well with the sideloaded Prime app. The latter has volume controls that work with CEC on my Jetstream/TV combo.

On a separate note, the Prime Video app seems to crash randomly on my box from time to time and the audio gets a bit choppy at times. In a perfect world, we'd have a decent single client app with a good UX that would aggregate content from both Netflix and Prime. Perhaps the next iteration of Live Channels will bring this dream closer to reality.