Was it this list that commercial skip discussion raised the question about determining current playback position? I discovered something that might help. When you push play on the remote (or program a send_key TVKEY_PLAY) an item gets written to /var/log/tivoLog.prv in the form of: 1009785485|Trick|TVKEY_PLAY|1179|1 where 1179 is the number of seconds into the show.