I'm poking around the net and finding that there are a lot of tricks you can do with the Tivo by entering secret codes on the remote control. For instance, I have enabled the 30 second skip feature using the appropriate set of button-pushes.

Does anyone know if one of these secret features will enable the display of seconds (instead of just hours and minutes) in the time-index bar at the bottom of the screen? You know, the bar that appears when you fast forward or rewind.

I can't find anything like that, but it seems like a feature the developers would add.

Well, according to This thread on the Tivo Community forum (now bought to you by Tivo) it may or may not work depending on your software release.
Heres the relevant bit of that thread:

In reply to:

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S-P-S-9-S - Toggles the Clock display in the bottom right corner. When you are watching LiveTV or a recording, this will show the time and where you are at in the recording. It's a toggle, so do it again to turn it off. However, when you turn it off, it doesn't disappear, you must go into a Tivo menu and return for it to go away. The Elapsed Time Indicator was removed in 3.0, to the general groan of everyone (it was very handy). They appear to have added it back to 3.2 on Series 2 boxes, but whether this becomes generally true is anybody's guess.

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S-P-S-9-S means [while playing a program] press Select, then Play, then Select, then 9 then Select to activate the feature.

But, if your box is running 3.0 software, you may be out of luck

Yeah, I'd seen that trick. But (a) it didn't say if the clock included seconds or not, and, (b) it isn't part of the transport bar which appears and disappears when you are FF/RW'ing.

I specifically want the extra digits of precision only during FF/RW and not in general.

However, I will try this and see if it shows seconds. It might still be useful in some situations.

It works on my (UK) Tivo [running 2.5.1 software].

It displays minutes and seconds "elapsed" into the recording - which is what you wanted - in mmm:ss format e.g. offset time of 2 hours 10 seconds shows as 120:10

On my Tivo it appears above the "Green transport bar" on the right hand side of the screen and stays there all the time, and its pretty unobtrusive.
during FF & REW operations it stays "synced" to the video so you can see the offsets jumping forward or back - at 3x FF speed, it jumps in 15 second increments.

Cool. Maybe I'll make it a macro on my 15-1994, then. Thanks!