DEV Community

Ryan Palo
Ryan Palo

Posted on

14 1

Control HTML Video Playback Speed with the Console

Quick tip!

My university online class videos don't have a playback speed option. This is doubly a bummer because the professor talks slowly, and I usually listen to podcasts at 2x speed. Between that and I don't have time to watch 4 hours of lecture a week at regular 1x speed, I needed a way to speed up the video. With no playback speed controls built into the UI, I thought I was sunk.

But then I realized: wait a minute! I know things about computers! And JavaScript!

I popped open an Inspect window, did some digging into the HTML to make sure I could do what I wanted to do, and then switched over to the Console. It only took two lines:

video = document.querySelector("video")
video.playbackRate = 2
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

And like that, my professor sounded like a chipmunk, and I had 2 extra hours of time to look forward to. I'm considering putting together a browser plugin to make some of my own video control buttons for the site!

Image of Timescale

🚀 pgai Vectorizer: SQLAlchemy and LiteLLM Make Vector Search Simple

We built pgai Vectorizer to simplify embedding management for AI applications—without needing a separate database or complex infrastructure. Since launch, developers have created over 3,000 vectorizers on Timescale Cloud, with many more self-hosted.

Read full post →

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
zimlearn profile image
Dr Abstract •

No kidding - what a great tip!

Billboard image

The Next Generation Developer Platform

Coherence is the first Platform-as-a-Service you can control. Unlike "black-box" platforms that are opinionated about the infra you can deploy, Coherence is powered by CNC, the open-source IaC framework, which offers limitless customization.

Learn more