Fast forward

On media control symbols, such as player buttons and interfaces, the function is commonly represented by two solid arrows pointing right and these typical icons were correctly recognised by 75% of a sample of European consumers.

With the advent of inexpensive digital music media, fast-forwarding has most likely lost its past meaning related to the speed of a tape deck motor (or record turntable, or another device allowing fast-forwarding) and now may, especially as cassette tapes and other analogue media are used less and less by younger generations, only apply to the operation of moving ahead in a recording's time frame—accomplished today by simple clicking, dragging a slide image, or even via speech-recognition software.

(Still, some CD and DVD players offer tape-style fast-forwarding, so that the user can detect when the destination is reached and stop.)

Finding more network bandwidth-conserving and computationally efficient algorithms for accommodating both fast-forward and normal speed viewing is an active area of research.

One study concluded that a 1:64 ratio surrogate (that is, show one frame out of every 64) allowed most participants to perform adequately on a range of tasks related to video understanding.