Monday, June 25, 2018

Speeding Up WWDC Videos

Ricky Mondello:

Wanna watch a lot of WWDC videos in a short time? If you’re in a web browser, on a page like this one, you can run some JavaScript to speed up videos:

document.querySelector("video").playbackRate = 1.4;

Maynard Handley:

And yet it’s 25 years after QT provided the foundational tech for this and not a single Apple AV app actually provides both of these in their most useful form.

None of this is rocket science. Spoken word and video BOTH

- need variable speed playback (properly LABELLED speeds would also be nice -- don’t know WTF Apple could never get this right)

- need decent forward and backward jump buttons, ideally programmable, otherwise 15 sec each

It’s frustrating. The WWDC app doesn’t let you adjust the speed and doesn’t properly remember which video you were in the middle of playing or what time you were at. I eventually figured out that you can jump forward and backward 15 seconds when it’s in full screen mode.

For most sessions, though, the slides and demos are not critical (and can always be viewed after the fact), so I’ve been using Overcast. It’s a few extra steps to download the videos, convert them to audio, and upload them, but playback works so much better, especially with Smart Speed.

Previously: WWDC 2018 Links.

Update (2018-06-25): Steve Moser:

Nice! Also you can make this into a bookmarklet so that you can speed up videos on iOS as well.

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Another option for going through session content quickly is ASCIIwwdc (https://asciiwwdc.com), which offers full, searchable transcripts for WWDC sessions going back to 2010. I just updated the site to include the 2018 sessions that currently have subtitles (more to come when they're available).

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