I’m on Ubuntu using VLC and if I recall correctly, it’s pretty friggin’ hard to make anything out once you get to 2x speed. I don’t think that’s the barrier for me, anyway.
VLC’s algorithms are not very good, and out of the box it only moves in x0.5 increments (there’s a setting to change that, but it’s hard to find).
Quicktime 7 is awesome at it (look for the A/V Controls), but Quicktime 8 can’t do it at all.
(A small note (probably for others, rather than JM-IV): it takes time for your brain to get used to very high speed audio—if you can’t follow at first, give yourself a few minutes to adapt)
Hm. I might try to get Quicktime working on Linux if you think sped-up lectures are more effective means of learning stuff than reading pdfs and so on.
Crank that slider a bit further—QuickTime 7 on OS X does it really well, and I do most of my video watching at 2.5x.
I’m on Ubuntu using VLC and if I recall correctly, it’s pretty friggin’ hard to make anything out once you get to 2x speed. I don’t think that’s the barrier for me, anyway.
VLC’s algorithms are not very good, and out of the box it only moves in x0.5 increments (there’s a setting to change that, but it’s hard to find). Quicktime 7 is awesome at it (look for the A/V Controls), but Quicktime 8 can’t do it at all.
(A small note (probably for others, rather than JM-IV): it takes time for your brain to get used to very high speed audio—if you can’t follow at first, give yourself a few minutes to adapt)
Hm. I might try to get Quicktime working on Linux if you think sped-up lectures are more effective means of learning stuff than reading pdfs and so on.
I think that different modes of presentation of the same content is a great learning hack, and verbal presentation without a speedup takes too long.
Generally though, given a transcript, I’d prefer to read.