Saturday, January 29, 2011

Play YouTube Videos at Double Speed

I enjoy watching video lectures on YouTube at double speed. (It saves a lot of time!)

Here's how. Download VLC and run it. Under the File menu, "Open Network ..." and paste in the YouTube URL. Then, under Playback, select Faster or Slower as needed.

Unfortunately, there's a catch: YouTube throttles download speeds. You can only download one second of video per second. So you'll have to wait for the video to finish downloading and then watch it. (Hey, at least you don't have to sit there and watch it download!)

Alternately, you can use VLC's Streaming/Exporting wizard to save the video to disk first.

Have fun!

3 comments:

Vijay Balakrishnan said...

Thanks for the tip.Pls post any other tips you use regularly on VLC.

Voldi said...

Thanks for the excellent tip! An alternative is to enable the HTML5 version of YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/html5) and use the play-speed setting (next to the resolution setting). It doesn't work with all videos yet, but they seem to be converting more and more to WebM format every day. The advantage to this option is that Google adjusts the throttle accordingly, so you never get stuck waiting for it to catch up.

Unknown said...

Excellent advice! VLC has excellent streaming, but I had no idea you could use it on YouTube.