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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame platforms don't generally support speeds greater than 2x. One of my "superpowers" or a curse is that I cannot stand normal speaking pace. When I watch lectures, I always go for maximum speed and that still is too slow for me. I wish platforms have included 4x but done properly (with minimal artefacts).

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I made a super simplistic chrome extension for this. Doesn’t work on all websites, but YouTube and most online video courses are covered.

https://github.com/sebastiansandqvist/video-speed-extension

I use a Chrome extension that lets you take any video player (including embedded) to 10x speed. Turn most things to 3-4x. It works on ads too

I use a bookmarklet:

javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video,audio%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20playback rate%22))}();

All audiobooks are like this for me. I tried it for lectures but if I'm taking handwritten notes, I can't keep up my writing.

I wonder if there is negative side effects of this though, do you notice when interacting with people who speak slower require a greater deal of patience?

I once attended a live talk by Leslie Lamport and as he talked, I had the overwhelming feeling that something was wrong, and was thinking “did he have a stroke or something?” but then I realized I had just always watched his lectures online and had become accustomed to listening to him at 2x.

No but a little. I struggle with people who repeat every point of what they're saying to you several times or when you say "you told me exactly this the last time we spoke" they cannot be stopped from retelling the whole thing verbatim. Usually in those situations though there's some potential cognitive issues so you can only be understanding.

I wonder if there is negative side effects of this though, do you notice when interacting with people who speak slower require a greater deal of patience?

You are basically training your brain to work faster, and I suspect that causes some changes in the structure of your memory; if someone speaks too slowly, I'll be more likely to forget what they said earlier, compared to if they quickly gave me the entire sentence.

I use this extension: https://mybrowseraddon.com/video-speed-control.html

There are fonts designed to be legibly at really small size. I wonder if there are voices that are especially understandable at extreme speeds.

Could use an “auctioneer” voice to playback text at 10x speed.

I'm also a fast listener. I find audio quality is the main differentiator in my ability to listen quickly or not. A podcast recorded at high quality I can listen to at 3-4x (with silence trimmed) comfortably, the second someone calls in from their phone I'm getting every 4th word and often need to go down to 2x or less. Mumbly accents are also a driver of quality but not as much, then again I rarely have trouble understanding difficult accents IRL and almost never use subtitles on TV shows/youtube to better understand the speaker. Your mileage may vary.

I understand 4-6x speakers fairly well but don't enjoy listening at that pace. If I lose focus for a couple of seconds I effectively miss a paragraph of context and my brain can't fill in the missing details.

https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed has been a wonderful addition for me.

Recently, YT started supporting 4x playback for Premium subscribers, but only in the mobile app, not on the web.

Can't you use VLC to watch almost anything streamable, and then play at your desired speed?

Robot in a human body identified :D.

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