I have been running vers 3.17NZ since its release in 2011. Ian's mods have considerably increased the value I place on my 3600, and I am most grateful for his work. However, I agree with the limited usefulness of the 8sec reverse step. I enjoy the 1 minute forward step and consider it more versatile than a 4 min. one. (Some breaks run to 5min these days if you include the promos.) I record quite a bit of off peak programming where the breaks tend to be more variable and would find a 20" or 30" back step more useful. The reason for this is the jumpy and intermittent flow of the reverse shuttle function. It is better to overshoot with the backstep setting and then shuttle forward if this is desired. My only other suggestion is, would it be possible to assign another button like maybe "0" to employ the original replay function of stepping back to the previous bookmark in the file, this being a marked location rather than a numeric step, thus not requiring any change to the step size value.
With 4m30s back and 4m forwards you could press forward, back and forward again to go 3:30 ahead. The problem with just using 30s back is you can't move quickly to arbitrary prior points in the recording any faster than the sluggish rewind function.
Ad breaks are usually 3m30s or 4m long so with 8s back, 1m forwards they respectively take 8 and 4 button presses. With 4m30s back and 4m forwards they would respectively take 3 and 1 button presses.
I wouldn't suggest 3m30 forwards, 3m back as that would cause overshoots with 3m45s long ad breaks.
I finally installed the 3.18 on my second unit. I think I prefer the 3.17 - 4min back and forward. Then I can just FF/Rew to adjust. Mostly, I live with the half a minute of ad or half a minute of loss of program.
I did want to share my frustration with the upgrade initially. I had put the files on my preloaded 64G USB key. It kept crashing the Magicbox. I tried the 16G - the same but it was faster. So, I finally deduced that the stupid thing read the entire contents into memory and then uses only the four files in the root directory.
The moral of the story is that use a blank USB key !!
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