Skip inactive
Skip inactive is the playback feature that fast-forwards through stretches of a recording where nothing happens, such as a user reading, idling, or leaving the tab. It compresses a 20-minute session with 3 minutes of activity into a watchable clip without discarding any data.
How it works
The player scans the event stream for gaps where no user-initiated events occur for longer than a threshold, then plays those ranges at a high speed multiplier instead of real time, usually with a UI indicator that time is being skipped. In rrweb-player this is the skipInactive option. The recording itself is untouched: skipping is a playback decision, so the same session can be watched in full when precise timing matters, for example when debugging a timeout.
Where you encounter it
In nearly every replay UI, because raw session watching is brutally time-inefficient without it. AI session summarization addresses the same problem one level up.