How to program a 30-second skip button for Xfinity X1

With a simple code, you can change the five-minute skip ahead button on the XR2 remote to skip ahead 30 seconds.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor

Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.

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Matt Elliott

Oct. 10, 2013 5:42 p.m. PT

2 min read

I am a Comcast Xfinity subscriber, and yesterday I got upgraded to the company's X1 cable box. I am enjoying the modern interface of the channel guide, the improved search functionality, and the potential to record four shows at the same time while watching a fifth. What I am not enjoying is the lack of a 30-second skip button, which I was able to program on my old remote.

I have come to rely on my 30-second skip button to zip through commercials and find it's a necessity this time of year for watching football and October baseball. It's almost always the right amount of time between plays for an NFL game (except for two-minute drills and when the Chip Kelly-led Eagles are playing and have the ball), and between pitches during what can be excruciatingly slow playoff baseball games.

The XR2 remote for Xfinity X1. Matt Elliott/CNET

After some searching, I found a code that worked for the X1 box and its accompanying XR2 (version U2) remote. While the process is easier than what my old cable box required, it requires a bigger sacrifice. On my old cable box, after a lengthy process, I was able to reassign a useless button as a 30-second skip. With the X1 box and XR2 remote, the process to reprogram a button takes only two steps, but you are forced to sacrifice the five-minute skip ahead button. And as a strange side effect, the five-minute skip back button changes to a 15-second skip back, leaving you with two 15-second skip back buttons on the remote.

At any rate, here is the quick, two-step process:

Step 1: Press the Exit button three times

Step 2: Press 0030

Now, when you use your remote, you'll find that the page up button, which previous skipped ahead five minutes, now skips ahead 30 seconds. And the page down button now skips back 15 seconds, even though the Replay button near the top of the remote also skips back 15 seconds.

I tried other amounts of time, thinking I could enter 0045 for a 45-second skip, 0100 for a one-minute skip, or 0202 for a Chuck Woolery two-minute-and-two-second skip, for example, but none worked. I was, however, able to return both the page up and page down buttons to five-minute skips by entering 0500 in the second step.

While I don't like having to sacrifice my five-minute skip buttons, my viewing habits have me skipping ahead 30 seconds more than skipping forward or backward in five-minute increments.

Are you an Xfinity X1 user? If so, have you found any useful hacks for the XR2 remote? Please comment below.