Zoom cloud recordings skip shortcut

tl;dr

        Use the tab key to get the progress bar highlighted (blue horizontal line will become brighter). You can then use the left and right arrow buttons to skip back and forward 5 (6?) seconds. Page Down takes you back one minute, Page Up puts you forward one minute.

With the pandemic still keeping many schools online and exams started or starting soon, it's time to start revising. Zoom, for better or worse, has been adopted by many schools and a number of those have made recordings of classes and lectures available via their Learning Management System. The City University of Hong Kong is a great example, where I am currently doing a PhD...

The problem? Well if you have done courses on MOOCs before, like Coursera, EdX (or one of the many national variants, like OpenEDU.ru, FUN-MOOC.fr, etc.) that were designed to be online, then you may end up turning up the speed to 1.25 or even 1.5 during the video and often at least 1.5 for a quick review. You will almost never need to push it up to 2 though, and skipping ahead is only really useful for trying to find something you think you remember being in a given video but can't really remember. With what most of us have had over the last few months is not anything like that though - it's just normal lectures with our lecturers sitting at their desk. In "real-life" lectures like this, you get HEAPS of dead time, and lecturers (all of mine anyway!) tend to speak very slowly and clearly. 

Now the Zoom player has only a couple of settings for speed - 1x, 1.5x and 2x. That's great, I can set it to 2x. What about all that dead time? What about when the lecturer asks a question and waits a minute for the answer? Fluffing around with the mouse(pad) and trying to guess when the action will start again is annoying and THE ZOOM CLOUD RECORDING PLAYER IS TOTALLY DUMB. There is no menu, and there are no sensible keyboard shortcuts for skipping. There are plenty of great free (open source) media players out there so I can only guess that, well, the devs and project managers aren't particularly bright... Anyway, I literally started hitting all of the keys on my keyboard (think "the IT crowd"...) and finally came across

        Use the tab key to get the progress bar highlighted (blue horizontal line will become brighter). You can then use the left and right arrow buttons to skip back and forward 5 (6?) seconds. Page Down takes you back one minute, Page Up puts you forward one minute.

Now you can at least try and pack that 1 hour lecture into a reasonable 15 minutes of knowledge action!