It would be nice if there was a fastest playback button and a rewind button. It seems right now it’s 2x and 4x only.
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yes it would be really nice if we could get the 8x speed in recorded games too
is already present in normal singleplayer mode if you type DEBUGSPEEDS in steam launch options, so I dont see why they dont allow us to toggle it for rec watching too 
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Pls add a rewind option to the playback, sometimes its hard to see whats going on when watching a recorded 4v4.
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It would be incredibly useful, but I expect it’s not easy given the storage format. Replays are basically a table of the commands issued, to my knowledge. They play out the same way each time because the game is deterministic. (I assume they store the PRNG seeds or something like that to be able to get the same archer hits and monk conversions.) Various RTS games work like this.
I can think of two ways you could go back n seconds in such a format. You certainly can’t just “undo” actions and play it backwards (rewinding like a video). The brute force way would be to go to the beginning and rapidly replay to that point, say at 200x. I seem to remember reading that the accuracy of command execution would be compromised at that point, which is why you can’t fast forward / jump to random points either.
The other way would be to memorize the state of all units (and buildings, resources, etc.) as you watch. This would probably be expensive in computation or memory, but not impossible. To get a sense of some of the things you’d need to save: location and HP of all units, location and trajectory of all projectiles, how long since each unit attacked, where each vil is in the accumulation of a resource, tree/fish/berry/mine HPs, building progress %s, each unit’s current task and queue, explored tiles, completed researches, and a million other things (relics, wonder years, simple stats like K/D to show on the end screen, etc). There are certainly ways to optimize that — e.g. only store values of resources if they’re not 100% — but you can imagine that polling and storing all that data would be taxing. Every frame would almost certainly be impossible. Who knows what a viable interval is — maybe 10 seconds or 30 seconds. Still better than nothing, though. Note that this would still not enable fast-forwarding, just reloading a state that has already been seen.
Note that Starcraft II actually does have rewinding, presumably by a system like the above. The question is, does AoE2’s older engine allow for that?
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Not being able to rewind is a pain. Last thing I want to do is restart a 50 min game to rewatch the last 10 seconds.
rewind would be better, game actually runs poorly at x4 and x8 with high pop.