Watch YouTube Faster

Swedish Translation, thanks to Eric.

It seems that YouTube supports faster (and slower) playback since mid-2014, on their new HTML5 player.

Just click the gear on the bottom-right, go to Speed and experiment:

Why is this a good idea? Because I find that watching at 1.5x doesn’t affect my understanding of the content. Of course, it depends on the video: how technical or complicated it is, how well edited it is, and the signal-to-noise ratio.

How much time does it save?

• 1.25x = 0.80 duration = 20% savings
• 1.5x = 0.67 duration = 33% savings
• 2x = 0.50 duration = 50% savings

For a typical 1-hour conference presentation, at 1.5x, that’s 20 minutes of my life that I get back.

If you don’t want to click, like me, there’s a keyboard shortcut to decrease/increase the speed: < and >, respectively.