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
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ScrollSidebar

    How many times are you putting together a HTML navigation block or utility block of elements that you wish could be seen everywhere on a page? I've created a solution that will seamlessly allow you to do so: ScrollSidebar. ScrollSidebar allows you...

  • By
    Highlight Table Rows, Columns, and Cells Using MooTools 1.2.3

    Row highlighting and individual cell highlighting in tables is pretty simple in every browser that supports :hover on all elements (basically everything except IE6). Column highlighting is a bit more difficult. Luckily MooTools 1.2.3 makes the process easy. The XHTML A normal table. The cells...

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!