Did you know that you can speed up YouTube videos? While it may not be the best idea for music and entertainment videos, it’s a great way to watch informational videos in a shorter amount of time. I speed up podcasts all of the time on my phone, so it’s helpful to be able to speed up YouTube videos as well.
In addition to speeding up YouTube videos, you can also slow them down. This may be useful if you are learning a new language and need to understand the speakers in the video better. Or perhaps someone’s natural speech patterns are too fast you can benefit from slowing down the video.
The only downside is that it appears as though you can only speed up YouTube videos from the desktop website. It isn’t possible to do this on mobile (at least on the iOS app at the time of writing this post) or on Apple TV. I hope Google adds this feature to mobile devices soon.
Step 1: On your video, click the gear icon near the lower righthand corner.
Step 2: Click “speed” in the menu.
Step 3: Choose your desired faster or slower speed.
The example I used was President Obama’s final State of the Union Address. It is one hour long. Doubling the speed (2) makes it 30 minutes. Speeding it up to 1.5, which is my preferred setting for most podcasts and speech videos, makes it 40 minutes. It’s a great time-saver.