Very interesting idea, but doesn't seem to work very well. I tried on three videos. On two it miscounted to an absurdly low rate of ~1 syllable/s and played it at the max speed which was illegible and in one it failed to detect any speech at all.
This would be a killer feature for a podcast app. I can't stomach NPR content unless it's sped up to almost 2x, with the exception of a few fast talking hosts.
It's pretty jarring to me how slooooow my regular podcasts sound when I accidentally play them at 1x. They're shockingly hard to listen to. Occasionally I'll want to share a bit from a show with somebody else, and when I play it at 1x I worry the hosts have had a stroke.
Aside: I play most of my podcasts in VLC. A killer feature there would be per-podcast default speeds. Some shows have hosts with unfamiliar accents and I have to play them slower than shows with accents I'm more used to. I change it manually per-play, but that would sure be a nice preference. (Probably a violently too-specific feature for a general media player like VLC.)
This is a very clever idea. Unfortunately I dislike installing extensions, because so many of them seem to get taken over by nefarious owners. Sadly it's poisoned the whole extension platform for me.
FYI: On Youtube, the keyboard shortcut for changing the video speed is simply pressing < or >
Note that this extension is offered on GitHub, not the Chrome Extension store, so if you load it from source it'll never be updated unless you update the code.
I do this for any extension I give big permissions. Rather than installing it from the Chrome extension store, I just download its source and 'load unpacked extension' directly. This method is just a roundabout a way to disable Chrome extension updates. (and of course I'm still trusting the extension's code quite a bit, but at least I don't have to worry about it changing)
This extension appears to be installed directly from the files - I don't think it would automatically update even if a nefarious owner later gained control of the repository.
I have a policy against installing extensions but I might make an exception for this one. I default to 2x and often have to go to 3x if the speaker is really slow. The one exception is music production related videos and it is sometimes excruciating to get through. This is most likely because I'm usually watching some kind of instructional or educational video and just want the content and have no interest in being "entertained". That said, I understand that you have to game YouTube's algo and rules in order to make even a tiny bit of money. Imagine if every channel cut the first 30 seconds of every video intro and everyone could just get to the point.
The extension you are looking for is "Sponsorblock". It crowd sources timestamps to auto-skip intros, ad-reads, credits, etc and is pretty customizable.
Sponsorblock instantly 'broke' video for me; I feel incredible discomfort watching any video without it. Amazing extension.
Such is its utility, this single extension lifts youtube as a platform higher above tv or or native video players on other sites which don't have any sponsorblock capability.
You could make a rewrite extension that seeks all video elements to 30s by default. Might not be perfect but it sounds like it would be useful for you.
For example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/re-enable-rig... is a Firefox extension that 'rewrites' webpages to remove 'disable right click' code, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop... 'rewrites' webpages to disable HTML5 video autoplay, etc. So you could, perhaps, rewrite the <source src=""> attribute within <video> elements to, if it doesn't already end with #t=x (x is in seconds), to end with #t=30. (Perhaps only the first one? This isn't something I desire, so my investment is limited.)
Pretty cool, would be great if it could detect accented speech and have a different normalized speed for that. I listen to most people at 2x or more, but I can't usually understand accented English quite that fast.
This is really cool. I build Chrome extensions too and the hardest part with anything audio related is getting the detection right across different types of content. Lectures vs podcasts vs casual vlogs all have very different speech patterns. I wonder if this could also work with non-English content since syllable detection probably breaks down with tonal languages.
What I found interesting is ... if you have some recorded lectures
from a university, some speakers are ultra-fast at 1x speed; and
some others are acceptable once at 1.5 or 1.75.
Most I find difficult to understand at 2.0x though, so I mostly
settled between the range of 1.25 to 1.5, sometimes 1.75 (depends
on the topic too, of course; some topic is harder to understand,
but here my thought was that some are able to speak fast and
others can not. It's almost a skill to have or not have).
Very interesting idea, but doesn't seem to work very well. I tried on three videos. On two it miscounted to an absurdly low rate of ~1 syllable/s and played it at the max speed which was illegible and in one it failed to detect any speech at all.
This would be a killer feature for a podcast app. I can't stomach NPR content unless it's sped up to almost 2x, with the exception of a few fast talking hosts.
It's pretty jarring to me how slooooow my regular podcasts sound when I accidentally play them at 1x. They're shockingly hard to listen to. Occasionally I'll want to share a bit from a show with somebody else, and when I play it at 1x I worry the hosts have had a stroke.
Aside: I play most of my podcasts in VLC. A killer feature there would be per-podcast default speeds. Some shows have hosts with unfamiliar accents and I have to play them slower than shows with accents I'm more used to. I change it manually per-play, but that would sure be a nice preference. (Probably a violently too-specific feature for a general media player like VLC.)
Be comforted by the fact that most somebody elses listen to humans talk at 1x speed.
This is a very clever idea. Unfortunately I dislike installing extensions, because so many of them seem to get taken over by nefarious owners. Sadly it's poisoned the whole extension platform for me.
FYI: On Youtube, the keyboard shortcut for changing the video speed is simply pressing < or >
Note that this extension is offered on GitHub, not the Chrome Extension store, so if you load it from source it'll never be updated unless you update the code.
I do this for any extension I give big permissions. Rather than installing it from the Chrome extension store, I just download its source and 'load unpacked extension' directly. This method is just a roundabout a way to disable Chrome extension updates. (and of course I'm still trusting the extension's code quite a bit, but at least I don't have to worry about it changing)
This extension appears to be installed directly from the files - I don't think it would automatically update even if a nefarious owner later gained control of the repository.
I have a policy against installing extensions but I might make an exception for this one. I default to 2x and often have to go to 3x if the speaker is really slow. The one exception is music production related videos and it is sometimes excruciating to get through. This is most likely because I'm usually watching some kind of instructional or educational video and just want the content and have no interest in being "entertained". That said, I understand that you have to game YouTube's algo and rules in order to make even a tiny bit of money. Imagine if every channel cut the first 30 seconds of every video intro and everyone could just get to the point.
The extension you are looking for is "Sponsorblock". It crowd sources timestamps to auto-skip intros, ad-reads, credits, etc and is pretty customizable.
Sponsorblock instantly 'broke' video for me; I feel incredible discomfort watching any video without it. Amazing extension.
Such is its utility, this single extension lifts youtube as a platform higher above tv or or native video players on other sites which don't have any sponsorblock capability.
You could make a rewrite extension that seeks all video elements to 30s by default. Might not be perfect but it sounds like it would be useful for you.
what's rewrite?
For example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/re-enable-rig... is a Firefox extension that 'rewrites' webpages to remove 'disable right click' code, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop... 'rewrites' webpages to disable HTML5 video autoplay, etc. So you could, perhaps, rewrite the <source src=""> attribute within <video> elements to, if it doesn't already end with #t=x (x is in seconds), to end with #t=30. (Perhaps only the first one? This isn't something I desire, so my investment is limited.)
See also: https://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/
Or ask gemini to summarize the video instead.
Pretty cool, would be great if it could detect accented speech and have a different normalized speed for that. I listen to most people at 2x or more, but I can't usually understand accented English quite that fast.
This is really cool. I build Chrome extensions too and the hardest part with anything audio related is getting the detection right across different types of content. Lectures vs podcasts vs casual vlogs all have very different speech patterns. I wonder if this could also work with non-English content since syllable detection probably breaks down with tonal languages.
How good is the web's support for having subtitles? I'd love a version of this that just worked off of subtitles, rather than audio processing.
Damn it!
Now I am called The Snail Speaker. :(
What I found interesting is ... if you have some recorded lectures from a university, some speakers are ultra-fast at 1x speed; and some others are acceptable once at 1.5 or 1.75.
Most I find difficult to understand at 2.0x though, so I mostly settled between the range of 1.25 to 1.5, sometimes 1.75 (depends on the topic too, of course; some topic is harder to understand, but here my thought was that some are able to speak fast and others can not. It's almost a skill to have or not have).
The math lectures I attended were even hard to follow with the speed it took to jot them down on the blackboard :)