Nic_Smith comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong

55 Post author: D_Malik 15 May 2013 10:27PM

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Comment author: Nic_Smith 25 May 2013 03:43:41AM 5 points [-]

I've personally found playing anime at 1.1x to be a difference which is barely even noticeable, but further speed increases to be somewhat annoying, and 1.5x+ to be unwatchable. It's likely low-hanging fruit for many, but YMMV.

Comment author: Baughn 31 May 2013 01:44:41PM *  1 point [-]

It depends a lot on the quality of the speed-up algorithm. One cheap way of speeding up audio is to drop samples, but this significantly reduces audio quality.

Personally, I find anything above 1.2x to be annoying, but I still do it - not to save time, but to improve my japanese-understanding capability.

Comment author: edanm 26 May 2013 10:31:09AM 1 point [-]

Here's why I think this is something most people can do:

I am personally a "native-level" English speaker, having spent 6 years of my childhood in English-speaking countries. I am now in a non-English-speaking country though.

A friend of mine who is also doing this is not a native English speaker, and while his English is quite good, it is clearly not native-speaking level. However, he also manages to watch almost all shows at least at 1.5X speed.

Of course YMMV, but I would encourage people to at least try this out and see if it hurts their enjoyment of shows or not.

Comment author: elharo 26 May 2013 12:23:43PM *  3 points [-]

I wonder, is it possible to slow down shows for those of us trying to learn a new language who have not yet reached 1X fluency? Assuming it's technically feasible, does it help? I'll have to try that.

Comment author: edanm 26 May 2013 03:19:44PM 1 point [-]

Very interesting idea, hadn't thought of thought. You can technically slow down shows in VLC by pressing the - key, it slows to 0.67X speed I believe.

Please let us know what you find, I may try it out myself for practicing Spanish.

Comment author: Baughn 31 May 2013 01:46:53PM 0 points [-]

Yep, that works. See uncle post - usually I speed things up, but for hard-to-understand shows I've found that slowing them down gives me more time to correlate subs and audio - or to try comprehending the audio without subs, at that.