Too busy or No time to watch videos. Do many of you watch videos in 1.5x speed or higher?

If you have too little free time that you frantically consume something instead of savouring or relaxing with it, that has never sounded relaxing to me and like more work which defeats the purpose of downtime.

Not videos, but i do often go through podcasts at 1,25 or 1,5x

I do not understand people who listen to things sped up.

@efesell: Yeah I don’t get this either. I listen to a lot of podcasts but if I don’t get to them then I don’t get to them. Listening to them sped up seems like it would defeat the point and also sounds kind of disorientating too.

I don't do this with videos. I will frequently change the playback rate of audiobooks based on the narrator.

At best I skip around videos, if there's only a certain thing I'm interested in seeing. Speeding up podcasts/audiobooks I just find personally strange, since it changes up the audio.

@crashman06: you get used to it. I started listening at 1.1x, the sped up to 1.5x, and now listening close to 1.8x (it’s an adaptive speed-up that reduces space between audio and varies the rate depending on density of audio). It doesn’t sound distorted to me at all.

The main problem for me is that when I watch the videos on 1x, they sound soooooo sloooooooow. After listening to the podcasts, Jeff sounds like an old grandpa on the videos to me now!

Okay so, I'm someone who does this - I speed read, I watch videos at 2x, I listen to podcasts at 2x-2.5x with the gaps auto-edited out, I don't watch twitch live because it's boring and slow, I don't watch TV shows because every show is 3 episodes of story in 8 episodes. It's not that I don't enjoy slowing down or being bored/understimulated - I love going to museums, watching slow movies, etc - but there is a difference between something being intentionally slow paced or ponderous vs. being tedious or wasteful. Obviously this is a question of personal preference!

A lot of content has shifted to being incredibly long-form (mostly for algorithmic reasons) and I think speeding up playback is a response to that. It's also something that wasn't really technically possible/commonly sought after until fairly recently - I mean, VLC has been able to do it for ages, but if you were to turn on the radio it was just at the speed that it was at. I think that this is just a feature that some people have always wanted but there was not the technical ability to provide it. I think it's really too easy to jump straight to "this must be a generational thing", and frankly I see no evidence of that. The poll above indicates only ~10-15% of viewers/listeners even take advantage of the feature when it is available - is it so hard to believe that there might be some people who just like stuff to go faster?

No. It sounds unnatural, it looks unnatural, and I'm already someone who listens to podcasts while doing other things and forgets what they talked about minutes after they ended so...just, no.

My knee jerk reaction to this concept is of course not, why would anyone want that? I don't have a huge anxiety problem - I don't get panic attacks or anything of that sort - but the thought of going through content faster and faster and faster definitely makes me anxious. That someone would welcome the idea of absorbing content at a faster pace than originally intended sounds incredibly foreign to me, especially since Twitch streams and Let's Plays and podcasts and such are a sort of mental distraction from the stresses of life. When I participate in these sorts of things, I put it on my second monitor while playing Minecraft or Halo or some single player game I know so thoroughly that I don't need to hear it clearly. Or they're background noise while I do chores. These are things that, as far as I'm concerned, exist to get my brain to slow down and shut up, not to make it more active and speed things up.

A lot of Youtubers are either longwinded or are trying to hit fifteen minutes per video for algorithm or monetization reasons...which is like ten minutes too long for me so yeah, I go 2xspeed a lot. Especially with streams I arrive late to in order to catch up. Really wish such an option was available on my DVR and Roku services at speeds at least up to 1.5.

Count me among the "thats weird" crowd. I understand why people do it but it sounds so odd and I just don't really need to consume podcasts faster. Typically I am putting them on when I am doing something long and drawn out so it's a perfect companion piece.

This idea is just so weird to me.

Like MAYBE if you just need the information from something then I can see speeding through it but on something you’re listening to casually..?

I did this recently when unemployed and trying and failing to cram shit on Udemy for a tech job since I feel I'm unqualified for anything.

Ever since learning about x2 speed in like 2015 there's been no going back. Everything from youtube to podcasts to audiobooks. Spotify does goes up to 3.5x which is just a touch beyond my ability to comprehend.

When I was studying for the bar exam, yes. For literally everything else, absolutely not. The videos/podcasts I tend to listen to in my spare time are generally of the comedic or personality-driven variety instead of pure knowledge dispensaries so putting them on faster speeds would defeat the purpose.

Lemme put my point another way. Why don't you listen to your podcasts/videos at 0.5x speed?

I guess I can't connect the dots between like... this thing is slow and tedious but oh I still like it I just need it to be over 2x faster.

No, and I'm not buying anyone's justifications for doing so outside of low attention span.

However, I wish that I could read at 1.5x speed. Some articles, journal/blog entries/forum posts seem interesting, but I'm very much a "Just get to the fucking point" kind of person, so I rather not go though paragraphs of rambling just to understand the thesis, some of their reasoning and research and eventually their conclusion. But I also consider reading to be a chore, so, eh, take that as you will.

no , i can't imagine enjoying things as much if i watched it at a increased speed. that said i do understand time being limited n all , i love games but sometimes its just a easier time sync to watch someone play certain types of games than it is to play them ( also cheaper) tho obviously it depends on the game.

I often watch YouTube videos at 2x speed. Primarily because I get bored quickly

That seems like an unfair comparison. Playing things at 0.5x makes things take longer for no good reason, which I'm sure is going to be your point for why you listen at 2x, to which I would say--even if there's filler involved for algorithmic reasons or episode counts--the content has an intended duration and pace. People's speaking has a cadence that can express information or emotion (e.g. speaking faster when worked up). A thoughtful gap between sentences can be interesting. 0.5x actively ruins the listening/viewing experience for those sorts of reasons and just from an audio quality perspective. Comprehending a whole sentence at 0.5x is just adding difficulty to the listening experience, none of which would necessarily happen at >1x.

My question is why not listen to things at the speed they are? You seem to want to cut through fluff (fair play to you), at which point I ask why not just skip ahead instead of experience it at 2x speed? Don't you run out of content to go through that's in your wheelhouse? I'm in the same boat as @justin258, I don't understand why people would want to cram more things into the same amount of time. That's so much stuff! I'm happy getting to what I get to with the time I have. I really don't understand the appeal of taking the content hose and shoving it down my throat so I can consume more, faster. Life is hectic enough, I don't need or want to increase the pace of my life on my downtime. Do people feel an obligation to watch things? Is that it? I don't get it.

I watch pretty much everything on Youtube at 2x. Any other platform that offers a speed increase I'll usually take advantage of.

How fast I watch videos depend on how quickly people speak. I tend to think and speak quickly. Listening to people speak slowly is agonizing to me. This is why cannot STAND games with voice acting (performance capture is fine). I can read about 3x faster than people talk, so listening to people have to say the lines out loud, especially silly when it’s just exposition, is agonizing.

I don’t think I’m special because I can read, and my brother reads much more quickly than I do. But this is a big deal for me in games and it’s making me enjoy newer games much less.

I’ve only consistently done it while listening to the Marc Maron podcast whenever he interviews anyone over 80. Nothing against the elderly, but some of those interview subjects were speaking at like 75% (at best) normal speaking speed. So I’ve done 1.5x speed on those a few times and it just sounds like a normal conversation.

Otherwise I used to use VLC to watch UPF at like 1.1x or 1.2x speed because it’s a barely noticeable change that saves me 20 minutes, and UPF really is a long show but I liked to watch it each week.

I don't really with TV or videos. Podcasts definitely. I usually listen at 1.5x but was at 2x at one point. Honestly you get used to it then normal speeds sound so odd. There was a handful of podcasts where I didn't know how they sounded normal til just recently after years of listening.

Been playing FF14 and it's a great game to listen to podcasts while playing. I'm so caught up that I have switched to normal speeds just extend them lol. That was strange for a bit but I'm used to it now.

If it's like an instructional video/podcast, or something else that's mainly for the information, I can sometimes speed it up a bit. If it's well produced and coherent enough it's rarely a problem to bump it up to 1.5x and still follow along. But I would never do that if my aim is to actually enjoy the content. The sheer thought of speeding up something like Welcome to Night Vale would be blasphemous.

I reached a crossroads with my 'content grind' a couple of years ago where I had too many podcasts/too much video content I was interested in than I could keep up with in the time I had. I briefly flirted with using a speed increase to get through it all but had to stop myself and realise I wasn't actually enjoying or absorbing a lot of it and instead just trying to get through it out of some internal obligation.

At that point I unsubscribed from a few podcasts and accepted that maybe I don't need to listen to/watch every single minute of content available to me. I can still enjoy a podcast by only listening to one episode a month or watching the odd stream/video whenever I have time without consuming the creator's entire back catalogue. My general rule now is if a podcast episode goes unlistened to for more than 2 weeks it gets deleted.

It's been a huge weight off my back and I find myself enjoying the stuff I do consume a whole lot more now that I'm not constantly checking the timeline to see how long it has left before I can start the next thing.

This is one of those concepts that makes me feel old, as the thought of doing it (audio even more so than video) just baffles me completely. Each to their own of course, but if I don't have the time to do something I just don't do it rather than speed it up just to fit it in. But then I have the same feeling about people who take it too far the other way (i.e. preserving the intention of the creator), telling people unless you've see 2001: A Space Odyssey in Cinerama you've not really seen it. I genuinely love that people can consume art and entertainment how they like these days, I just don't always understand the paths some people go down when doing it.

No I wouldn't do that, in the end I would watch less content and then stretch it over time instead of speeding the videos up. It almost gives me anxiety thinking about feeling like you have to rush through the stuff you use to relax.

Also, what if reality at some point becomes too slow? What if I have watched so much video and listened to too many podcasts sped up, that my attention span breaks?

I don't usually, I did try watching a youtuber's videos slightly sped up because she talked so damn slow but in the end I just unsubscribed and stopped watching her.

1.5 is too high for me, I usually do 1.2 or lower to make it slightly faster but not breaking the rhythm. I always thought it was weird to watch videos or listen to podcasts sped up, but as someone who's getting less and less free time, I got used to it rather quickly and I'm glad when I have that option.

But I got a different question: is the option to speed up videos still available at Giant Bomb? I can't find it anymore.

Only for information in too-long videos if I'm watching a guide or something, anything I hope to enjoy I'll keep as is

Why not just skip around and find what you need?

This makes me feel old.

(emphasis mine)

Just want to be clear - I fully expected to be in the minority here, but I want to make my case because I think everybody is thinking about this the wrong way and it bugs me.

I never said "I watch everything at 2x" because that's not true. I love 2001: A Space Odyssey and I have never watched at 2x because I like it at 1x and the music would sound goofy if it went faster. Likewise, I don't speed up a few podcasts (Radiolab has frequent musical breaks that sound funny at double BPM, for example) and some other podcasts have fast-speaking hosts (Keep it! comes to mind) and those don't need to be sped up as much. But I also think that changing art so you enjoy it more is fundamentally a good thing to do. Like, fuck what the author thinks, I'm allowed to do whatever I want, they're not even my real dad!

If the podcast is say, just an uploaded conversation, the pace of the conversation is not intended as much as it is a product of the people speaking. I don't see how I'm committing some grave art crime by speeding that conversation up? Like....I'm allowed to consume content the way I want, and I like things to go fast for reasons beyond "I'm trying to get through 48 hours of podcasts every day" - I just like things faster, man!

The point I want to make about all you 1x or bust people w/r/t 0.5x is this - you say (and I think most people here would say) that slowing the podcast down wastes time for no good reason (I would agree!) My point is that to me, 1x feels like 0.5x and that is not subject to debate because it's the way I perceive the content. I'm not trying to be a jerk about all this, but I think it's a little ridiculous to claim that my subjective perception is wrong or immoral or that I'm somehow missing the point. We, as people who have grown up in different communities and environments perceive speech differently. Someone who learned English as a second language might love being able to slow down their podcasts to 0.75x. I also listen to some German language podcasts slowed down because my German is not very good - should I listen to them at 1x because that's the speed they're recorded at?

To the point on speaking cadence/emotion - I agree. Those changes in cadence and short pauses are preserved! The compression is mostly linear in time, so if someone slows down while speaking it's still relatively slower. Gaps longer than a few seconds are edited out because that's how I like it. If I feel like I want to stop and think about something, I just pause the podcast (or is pausing the podcast destroying authorial intent too?)

Finally, I really want to emphasize that this is not primarily motivated by a desire to consume twice as much content in the same time. It's just how I like things to go. Adjusting the speed of a podcast or video is fundamentally an accessibility setting and is basically no different than adding subtitles or descriptive audio.

Again, please understand that I'm not like, mad at you or anyone here, but I think it's really bad to shame people for enjoying stuff the way they want to enjoy it.

I tend to watch a lot of the Giantbomb stuff while I'm gaming at the same time so I've got plenty of time to consume the content, no need to speed anything up from my end.

Going through content at a slightly higher speed doesn't mean that you don't really enjoy said content or only go through it to be able to check it off your mental list. At 1,25 or 1,5x the speed, you can still easily follow along with what is said and personally i don't sit there straining my brain to gobble up all the information at that speed. At around 2x is where it's no longer fun casual listening for me.

I consume all my GB content at 1.13x, it used to be 1.09x but i found i could go a little faster, it's not a huge increase but it puts a little more pep in everyone's step and doesn't upset game audio too much, though i have found some game soundtracks sound better when sped up.
I don't know the proper math, but i worked it out that i'm saving roughly 14 minutes of a 2 hour podcast? ... which makes me think i should speed it up a bit more :P

To me this defeats the purpose of listing or watching the thing as intended, and that is fine, but I feel you don't absorb any information nearly as well doing so. That would be like listening to an album at a faster speed to just get it faster, but completely ruining any enjoyment and just listening for the sake of it making it completely disposable. To me, none of that seems enjoyable and you lose a lot of context of what is being said.

Never. It kills the natural pace of conversation to me. If I can't fit a podcast or video in at its natural length, I just wait until I can, or I consume it in chunks. Just a "me" thing, really.

There’s something about the whole “I saved such and such time doing this” that really bums me out.

I have shorten silences turned on in my podcast app, but that's it.

Also, this reminds me of that one sketch in Portlandia where Fred Armisen goes insane remembering that he has to watch Netflix DVDs, but then also check tweets, but also read a new article, but then has to watch Netflix DVDs, etc.

I think it has more to do with WHY we consume media than HOW, and personally: I watch videos to relax, to unwind, and even to space out. Some people nod in agreement, I'm sure others think, "That's unhealthy, you have someone else's voice in your head when you should just be decompressing," and still others, like those in this thread, just think it's ponderous and slow.

I'd assume the folks in here who are eager to consume as much as possible through the course of a day probably spend a lot more time in silence than I do, or at least I'd hope they do because seriously, I've gone days where I stimulated myself constantly throughout the day and it nearly drove me insane because I had no internal monologue for a bit.

Each to their own, I don't think it IS indicative of doing something wrong or right, but I certainly think it COULD be (see: not wanting to have a moment's time to consider and just wanting to consume consume consume because you don't really like where you are in the moment).

It seems lunatic to me, but there are people out there who look at Let's Plays in their entirety and think it's the most ludicrous thing they've ever seen.

I can't help but feel bummed looking at this thread. Cut some stuff out of your life you don't need and just enjoy natural the stuff you do enjoy. Also, silence and time to yourself is, I think, golden for your health.

I am familiar with the concept of watching things sped up but have always found it rather odd. I don't know if it comes from a need to consume more content in as little time as possible, but let me tell you - life is much better once you accept that you don't need to watch all the shows, or have watched and have an opinion on everything. I would much rather be selective in choosing which content to consume than try to cram in more noise and dilute my experience of each piece of media. I have ADHD, and sometimes my concentration can slip even when watching/listening to something at regular pace, so I feel like I could listen to a whole podcast on 1.5x speed, but then wouldn't have absorbed or understood anything that anyone was saying.

This idea gave me so much anxiety that I actually vomited in my mouth a little.

I think you summed up my feelings well, so I'm happy i made this topic. It would help explain my ability to enjoy a slow burn but need to speed stuff up once in a while. I don't really do it out of hellish pressure to consume, but I enjoy getting more out of my day, and sometimes I'm not used to the laborious way people talk since I talk fast personally. I figure it's hard to explain since I now know most don't speed things up and see speeding things up as ruining the experience. But like you, I think it's just a way to cater to your entertainment. I'd slow down a speech if studying for a test, or rewind. Use subtitles in a show to understand actors mumbling even if it gives away plot I wasn't supposed to hear so clearly. etc.

I definitely think there's a divide since I can listen to material up to 3x speed but started off having trouble at 1.25. You definitely get use to it and it depends on how slow the speakers are. Youtubers are speaking slower as well in some of the material I watch such as video essays that I kinda just want the information from, not the profound pathos of how they speak.

I figure it's case by case with what people want to speed up and not. People were excited to get 3x speed movement in RPGs like ff12 remasters to carve through the grind. Many devs find voice acting a waste since people skip the dialogue once they read it themselves. Yet, people state speeding up leisurely podcasts and movies is going too far. I wonder if the same people think speed reading is bad, or using reading text software loses the point of prose. Overall, I'm glad I have an explanation the next time my friends freak out about me listening to what sounds like chipmunks, yet it's clear to me, on my headphones. Ill respect their wishes to take it all in at a normal pace as well.

PS: Speeding up music isn't a fair example, though I hate to admit that I have tried it when listening for lyrics only, (never worked well). I figure music is more for emotional resonance and speeding up podcasts or stories in a movie is about getting through the information you'd get through anyway just faster. Getting through a song faster doesn't work the same, also songs are short, hence why you can listen to the same song 100 times, and it's not considered repetitive. Play the same game level exactly the same 100 times and you'd get tired.