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I've started watching TV Shows at 2X speed. This has been incredible:
I started doing this a few months ago. It started when I realized that I already listened to Audiobooks at 2X-3X, and that TV Shows are basically the same thing.
Some tips:
I have friends who do this with lectures and audiobooks, which seems at least more productive-sounding.
I started with audiobooks and lectures as well. Since I'm a big fan of watching TV/Movies, applying the same thing to this area has allowed me to double the amount of consumption, while not really diminishing my enjoyment of the shows that I watch (and, in some cases, enhancing it if the show is slow but otherwise good).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I highly recommend people who use cars to somehow do this in their cellphones and connect the cellphone to the car soundsystem.
I cannot stress how much Traffic is not traffic anymore as soon as it become introduction to evolutionary anthropology. Bostrom told me there is cellphone software for accelerating podcasts, but it only worked for paid ones. Does anyone know one that is free?
Actually, I would suggest not focusing your attention on evolutionary anthropology while you're supposed to be piloting a multi-ton vehicle at high speeds.
Most people are far worse at driving than they believe themselves to be.
Now, assuming you're not in a car at the moment, you can probably hack something up using mplayer - there's at least one android port of that. You may need to write your own UI, though, and I suspect it'll reduce your battery life significantly. (Android native players take advantage of decoding hardware, mplayer probably doesn't. Also, the fourier transform required to speed up voice without affecting pitch is expensive.)
When you're driving a daily commute your mind is going to wander unless you have extraordinary focus control / mindfulness training. It's not obvious to me that it's more dangerous to have it directed to evolutionary anthropology than to what you're going to do when you get home (or wherever else it wandered).
There's a difference between accidental mental wanderings and deliberately focusing on a sped-up textbook.
If you're listening to a sped-up textbook without focusing on it, I'd say you won't get much out of the experience.
(After reading that sentence, in particular the word “evolutionary”, before reading what you were replying to, I had briefly thought you were arguing against this and gone WTF.)
Interesting. I definitely do this with Coursera... but you haven't noticed any dramatic timing being thrown off?
Not really, in the sense that everything is half the time so the timing between things is still intact.
Are there some "dramatic sequences" in which I miss part of the intention of the directors/etc.? Yes, I'm sure there are. But for at least a large portion of the shows I watch, most of the important stuff is in the dialogue anyway.
Disclaimer: I'm probably a less visual person than most, which means I don't pay as much attention to the visual aesthetics of shows as others do. Also - some sequences even I don't watch at 2X, mostly action sequences and the like.
I've switched from VLC to Daum's PotPlayer which has fantastic support for youtube videos and playlists and allows speeding up videos like this. It also uses significantly less memory and cpu than watching youtube in firefox.
Yeah, I've been doing this too, but only after I've determined something to be too boring when I try to watch it normally. I'm glad I didn't watch Puella Magi at 2x, for instance.
Another tip: Youtube can be watched at 1.5 and 2x, as well as slower speeds, but you have to go to testtube first and enable the experimental HTML 5 player.
(Currently it seems a little bugged: if you select a higher speed, you can't go back to 1x, because the normal speed button doesn't work. Reloading fixes that.)
I've been looking for a way to do this automatically. Whenever I start a video, I have to manually change the speed to 2x; sometimes I forget and end up wasting large amounts of time. I've been looking for a chrome extension or something, but I can't find one.
Has anyone had any luck with automating this?