21. 2FF Youtube Viewer

2FF (2-level fast forwarding) Youtube Viewer

A YouTube player for watching at very high speed

A viewer that watches YouTube videos at considerable speed by using the subtitles to switch the playback rate automatically: a little faster where someone is speaking, and much faster where no one is.

How much more video must we watch before we die? There are of course masterpieces and important news that we want to take our time over. But the more video there is, the more of it falls into the category of "I cannot quite decide whether to watch this." This is an application and service for people today, for calmly consuming such video, even at the cost of spoiling its intended beauty.

There are two ways to use it.

(1) A Chrome extension, the 2FF YouTube Viewer, supporting up to four times speed, is available for trial from this link. Documentation is still to come.

(2) There is a web service supporting up to double speed that you can use straight away without installing anything (the video above shows it). Go to

https://2ff.azurewebsites.net/youtube.html?v=YouTubeVideoID

and you can use it immediately. The YouTube video ID is, for example, y2CdzAdOMp4 if the URL you want to watch is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2CdzAdOMp4.

There is also a bookmarklet here that builds the link above from the video you are watching on YouTube and opens it.

It has been tested with Chrome and Firefox on Windows and macOS. It also works in Safari on macOS, but not smoothly. Unfortunately it cannot be used on a smartphone.

The playback rate is also not controlled properly unless the browser is in the foreground. (Minimizing the browser and listening to the sound alone does not work.)

The system is aimed at videos to which the author has added subtitles. We are also experimenting with YouTube's automatic subtitles from speech recognition, but they are generally inaccurate, so that feature is not published at present.

Below is an example embedded with an iframe. (To use the full screen, please go to the dedicated site.)

The code looks like this.

Below is an example of applying it, with our own speech recognition, to a video that had no subtitles.

2016/12/04, video of the second stage of Mashup Awards 2016

A site for HCI researchers, for watching recordings of domestic conferences at high speed, is here.

How it came about

The system applies the technology of CinemaGazer, which I studied several years ago.

The idea of an application for watching YouTube at high speed had been around for a long time. I took it up again now because the world has changed in ways that favour this technology.

Browsers' HTML5 video players have matured, making fast playback possible without changing the pitch of the audio.
More videos on YouTube now carry accurate subtitles, so there are enough videos to enjoy without doing our own speech recognition.
Video takes up an ever larger share of the information we take in during our lives.