Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Set Video Playback Speed with JavaScript

By  on  

I love that media has moved from custom plugins (Flash…gross) to basic HTML <video> and <audio> elements. Treating these media sources as just another element allows us to use CSS filters to adjust display, for example. The less we need to do with ffmpeg or plugins, the better.

I’ve been noticing that many video sites have implemented a feature to adjust video playback speed, which is awesome if you’re trying to get through some sports highlights faster or to see that monster slam dunk in super slow motion. I was hoping it didn’t require some special type of server to send the file in slower or faster chunks and I was right: all you need is the playbackRate property!

const video = document.querySelector("video");

// Slow it to 50% speed
video.playbackRate = 0.5;

// Twice as fast!
video.playbackRate = 2;

// Back to normal
video.playbackRate = 1;

Using a number less than 1 slows the video down, a number larger than 1 speeds the video up, and 1 restores the video to normal speed. Also note that playbackRate is not a HTML attribute — it’s a property.

Adjusting playback rate isn’t something you’d want to do for all video sites, but if you think your users may like it, it’s only one HTML element property away!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • By
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS pointer-events

    The responsibilities taken on by CSS seems to be increasingly blurring with JavaScript. Consider the -webkit-touch-callout CSS property, which prevents iOS's link dialog menu when you tap and hold a clickable element. The pointer-events property is even more JavaScript-like, preventing: click actions from doing...

  • By
    Send Email Notifications for Broken Images Using MooTools AJAX

    One of the little known JavaScript events is the image onError event. This event is triggered when an image 404's out because it doesn't exist. Broken images can make your website look unprofessional and it's important to fix broken images as soon as possible.

Discussion

  1. Sid Vishnoi

    I created a little bookmarklet that helps me speed up the really slow videos on YoutTube 

    javascript:document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = parseFloat(prompt());
  2. Arley

    Of course it works great on as well!

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!