Tom Keating over at TMCnet writes that his DirecTV DVR has a new firmware that has introduced a bug in his fast forward feature. He says that after the update, his DVR does not stop accurately when he is fast forwarding through commercials. In fact, he said it even puts him back to a point before he started the fast forwarding.

I don’t use or know much about the DirecTV DVR (with the DVD receiver), but the fast forwarding appears to work much like Tivo’s. If you’re fast forwarding, and stop after the commercials are over, Tivo backs up a few seconds so that you reach the correct stop point. It looks like the DirecTV DVR is taking this fast forwarding correction to the extreme and going back too far.

In order to avoid this problem, Keating said he has to slow down and use the slower 2x or 3x fast-forward now since the 4x doesn’t work correctly anymore.

DirecTV “espouses” this feature on their website when they write, “Fast-forwarded too far? Fast Forward Correction takes you to where you really wanted to stop”. Yeah, right. Can I sue for false advertising? Losing the ability to FFW is really starting to tick me off.

Although Keating admits that he can use the 30 second skip button, an over-sensitive correction feature can definitely frustrate veteran DirecTV DVR users. I wonder if DirecTV will fix this or if users will have to have a work around.

Are you a DirecTV user and are experiencing this problem? Write a comment so we can track this and see if there’s a fix available.

Technorati Tags: DirecTV, DVR, fast forwarding, digital video recover, DirecTV DVR, Tivo