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Title is a tongue in cheek. This is mini guide/tips on how to effectively watch videos at 2-3 maybe even 4 x speed depending on the video. A time saving measure if you will.
Update: Added link to browser extension that speeds up videos.
Note: Skip to Setup for instructions.
Why
I tend to watch more tech talks/lectures nowadays probably because I started doing this. But before I found them to be a bit slow to watch and don’t really keep my attention. First I started to watch them with the standard multiplier that came with websites html5 players and going to 1.5 to 2 speed. This kind of blew my mind at first. The most annoying part of video guides/tutorials/talks/lectures is the essentially spreading of content to fill time, either deliberate or not (doesn’t make it less annoying). Also videos are easy to watch and don’t require too much thought even on a technical topic. So for me it can really turned the netflix and chill into the tech talk and chill. Knock out a couple of videos in a session the high speed really makes you focus otherwise you end up missing something. Not saying I no longer relax, there are only soo many lectures you can watch at a time before you get tired of them and actually need to do something not tech related at all.
There were issues with the default setup. The voices tend to go high pitch and depending on the voice/style of the person speaking can really make it hard to understand. I was using MPV as my native player at the time and I was playing around with configs for fun as you do…
I ended up finding a setting that helped with pitch correction and combined with youtube-dl addon in MPV allowing you to play youtube video natively on your desktop, I ended up hitting speeds from 2x (minimum) all the way up to 4 in rare cases. My average is probably around 2.5-3 x speed but it still really depends on the speaker but there is a definite improvement in the clarity of the speaker. And if it wasn’t obvious, this really changes the way people sound in the videos and does cut a lot of the subtleties out so it’s not really fun watching a story like this, like for example a movie.
Setup
Pick browser or MPV or both up to you.
Setup browser
Chrome only: Link
I found a chrome extension that allows you to speed up videos on YouTube above 2x so if you don’t want to use MPV below. It even works on Netflix (Primary reason I use it).
Fun fact: After I found it, I discovered I already had it installed but disabled. I think a while ago I went through an add-on purge and it was killed.
Setup MPV
Install MPV LINK Install youtube-dl LINK
Config settings to add to mpv.conf Located in: * Linux users: ~./.conig/mpv/mpv.conf * Mac users: * Windows users:
Main settting:
af=rubberband
This is the pitch correct setting. It is only active when the speed goes above 1, so you can use the player as normal when not speed watching.
Extra settings
ytdl-format="bestvideo[height<=?720][vcodec!=vp9]+bestaudio/best"
Youtube-dl settings are optional but it will automatically play the video at the best possible quality and depending on your bandwidth playing at the high speeds will have constant buffering. My internet provider for some reason has a painful connection to youtube and I found restricting videos to 720p allowed playback to keep up without buffering constantly. Increase or reduce the resolution based on your internet situation.
cache-default=1536000
cache-secs=60
Another nice to have setting is the cache options. This allows you to leave a video open to buffer. Usually both settings are used in conjunction but sometimes cache-default is not used at all so the buffering is based on the seconds set in cache-secs.
Note: Cache-default is in KB
Usage
To use just drag a video from url or a link (can be an image link).
Note: I found problems when I tried using Google Chrome and dragging links into mpv not finding videos. With firefox dragging directly off the webpage works fine. Not sure why this is.
or try typing in terminal mpv https:www.example.com/foo
youtube-dl supports a lot of website out of the box so the best way to find out if it works is just to try.
If you do encounter issues playing from a website you can just use the inspect element in the context (right click) menu in a browser and find the link directly point to the video https://www.example.com/video.mp4 can be in other formats too.
Once playing use the [ (slow down) and ] (speed up) keys to adjust speed.