How to Speed Up Videos

A few weeks ago I was browsing my YouTube Watch Later lists and thinking: There are many good quality videos, I wish I could watch them faster to see more of them. All these screencasts, comedy, Tech Talks, conference presentations … I searched for fun tools to watch videos faster.

Video Speed Controller

I found out this is a wish, I’m not the only one to have it. Fortunately, the developer Ilya Grigorik, working at Google, has created a Google Chrome extension, which was made for this: Speeding up HTML5 videos.

And with Flash being nearly dead and services using HTML5 video, this is a blessing. The extension allows you to increase or decrease the speed of any video, jump back, and forth or back to regular speed. This even works on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

I read a detailed article about this topic. It compared watching famous TV shows at regular speed and with increased speed, and how people got used to watching videos at 1.6 times to 1.8 times speed and were still able to follow the content without any issue. Even more, the author argued, jokes are even funnier with increased speed.

At first, it feels strange, and I started at 1.2 times speed but soon increased to 1.8 (and sometimes even 2 or more). I use it now regularly on many videos, foremost on technical talks, which tend to get long-winded.