I often set the playback-rate of youtube videos to something like 1.25 or 1.5 to get through a video a little faster without getting bored.
But sometimes 1.25 is a little to fast for my taste.
So i just went and had a look into the html and found that i can easily get any playback speed i want by running this snippet:
document.getElementsByClassName('video-stream html5-main-video')[0].playbackRate=1.125;
This sets the speed to 1.125. But any rate will do: 0.69, 4.20, 6.666. Doesn’t matter.
It’s kinda obvious that it will throw an error if there is not at least one element on the page with the classnames ‘video-stream html5-main-video’, but nevermind.
I then added this snippet into a browser-bookmark i can click anytime i’m watching a yt video and want to set the speed.
javascript:{document.getElementsByClassName('video-stream html5-main-video')[0].playbackRate=1.125;}
PSA, do not copy any JS code on the web to your browser unless you understand it or it has been validated by many others.
in general, well-established browser extension are unlikely to be malicious, but random JS code on the internet can.
(in this specific case, the code seems fine to me.
I was actually surprised that you could still bookmark
javascript:URLs since you can’t paste them into the address bar anymore.
Doesnt youtube have a playback speed option built into the player?Sorry, I get it. This allows any playback speed whereas youtube has specific options
I think what they’re trying to tell you is that you can have ANY playback speed instead of the 4 options given by the built in player.
Ah yes I get it! Thanks
Yes, but it goes in steps of 0.25 and that sometimes is too coarse/rough.
E.g. 0.50, 0.75, 1.00, 1.25, 1.5
This snippet is just to get a little more fine-grained control.
If you replace the speed number with
Number(prompt(“New speed:”, 1.15))you should get a dialog box to put a new speed in, so you don’t have to make multiple bookmarks.BTW, glad to see bookmarklets still living. If I wasn’t wrong, Firefox seems to be the only browser supporting it.
Chromium browsers still support bookmarklets
I use Enhancer for YouTube. It uses step increments of .1 plus has a ton of other features like being able to take a screenshot of the video.
I made myself a Firefox extension with a slider in the player. Super easy to control and change with a slider.
I use a plugin called Video Speed Controller, it‘s probably my most used browser extension. You can configure hotkeys as well, which makes it very convenient. I use Q/E for -0.5/+0.5 and A/D for -0.1/+0.1 so I can finetune the playback to my liking with just couple keypresses.
There’s also a small window in the top left of the video showing the current speed, which you can toggle by pressing V.
This community is full of nice smart little tips! I 💕 it!
Why not just use an extension?
because doing stuff yourself is fun*!*
but yeah, for most people and most use cases using an extension is obviously the better choice :)
- enhancer for yt is closed source afaik
I use vidspeedcontroller
This is a great solution, but unnecessarily cumbersome to use, in my opinion.
For the same outcome, I use Video Speed Controller to modify playback speed of any video on any website.
Saved.
Thanks for this. Used to get a browser extension just for this. Some people on youtube talk reaaally slow that x2.0 sounds like their normal talking speed
No kidding. I’ve found I’ve got increasingly more impatient with slow talkers since I started messing with the playback speed. I used to watch videos at 1.25-1.5x, now its up to 2.5-3x
Nice one, thank you! This’ll come in handy for when even 2x isn’t fast enough to get to the point.
I recommend Enhancer For Youtube too, it’s a nice extension that adds a bunch of useful stuff, like being able to playback at any speed you want.
