If you play a non-Microsoft format video from the VMC video library, the rewind and fast forward buttons don’t work. I discovered a program called MediaControl that is supposed to fix this but I couldn’t get it to run so I thought I would add this feature to my MCIS Pro software. It will be included in the next release shortly.
The reason that Microsoft format videos (WMV and DVR-MS) act differently is that they use the new Vista Media Foundation platform and other formats (AVI, MOV, etc) use the legacy DirectShow platform.
So to implement this feature I looked at the Media Center transport interface but this wouldn’t change the playback speed for these files. Next I got hold of the DirectShow filter graph using the FFDShow filter and tried that. It allowed setting playback speed up to 9x but in fact never went faster than 3x and reverse didn’t work. It seems that DirectShow relies on the playback filter and these rarely include rewind capabilities due to the complexity with the compression format. So that is why Microsoft do not implement this feature in VMC. I also looked at the FFDShow API but that implements rewind and fast forward by jumping around.
So my current plan is to use DirectShow to set the first FF speed to 3x and then for faster speeds and for rewind will jump to a new position repeated every second. Not an ideal solution but really the only way to achieve an adequate result.