VLC Alternative (That Play videos faster!)?

sponsoredwalk

I'm watching a heck-load of video lectures from this website using vlc
player because it offers the opportunity of playing the video at different
speeds without turning the voices into a chipmunk-style atrocity.

The problem is that every so often, think 10 times in an hour-long lecture, the
sound just cuts out for no apparent reason while the video continues on
playing.

This only happens using vlc player, whether played at normal speeds or
not, but vlc is the only player I can find that will play these files and give
the option of playing at twice the speed while keeping normal sound.

Any ideas?

the files are .mov btw...

Fysh

If the only player you can find that offers this functionality can't do it correctly, I would guess that it's because implementing that functionality in a sufficiently robust manner as to handle all sorts of files with all sorts of encoding patterns is either impossible or not viable for a freeware project.

Have you been able to verify that this problem happens with videos from other sources, or whether there are any common attributes to the videos where the problems occur? Have you been able to test this behaviour on more than one machine to confirm that it's definitely VLC at fault? (I'm thinking in particular that it might either be related to VBR-encoded audio or a caching issue associated with however the audio is processed to play back at normal speed)

Another alternative might be to rip out the audio from the videos themselves, then put it through something like Audacity and the Time Track function to achieve the speed increase without increasing the pitch. (I've not tried this, but a bit of Google suggests it should be possible).

sponsoredwalk

Yeah it's definitely just vlc, I've used video playing software on both
windows & linux testing this problem & it only occurs for me using vlc
player.

Forget about playing videos faster, the problem of the sound cutting out
happens just using vlc player to play the files at normal speed anyway.
At specific times in the video files the sound cuts out. If I'm watching it
& the sound cuts out at 23:04 with video continuing to play I'll have to
move the position bar to a different time to get the sound to resume.
It's so annoying having to change the position bar to around 23:06 to
continue watching then for it to happen at like 28:39 you know. If I
change the bar back to 23:00 & let it play it'll happen again at 23:04.
Such a weird situation.

I could use another file playing program to watch the videos without the
sound cutting out but I just can't find any different software that gives
the option of playing the file at, say, double speed, or 1.5 speed, without
turning the voices into chipmunks, that's really the issue here.

It's too much effort to take 100 hour long videos and take the sound out,
double the speeds, and put them back onto the video doubled up,
especially when I need to slow things down at certain points in the file.

Just hoping some alternative software exists if anybody knows about it.

tadcan

What other programs have you tried that were too slow, windows media player, quicktime player, splayer?

Fysh

I suspect that if we're talking about hour-long calculus lectures, you're probably going to have to take the bullet and watch them at normal speed. I'm very curious about whether software exists that can sort this out for you, though.

sponsoredwalk

http://www.howtodothings.com/video/how-to-consume-videos-at-double-speed

Found this just now, it's perfect! I've been through such hell with quicktime
& itunesU is unbelievably slow (found a way around that! ) but this has
to be the one useful thing these ******* ******* *** *** *******
have ever done & it's really great!

Naikon

If you manually download and compile mplayer(don't worry, it's not too involved) the script will ask you if you want ffmpeg support built into the resultant executable.

To this day, I have not found a player better than mplayer. Plays practically any file out of the box. Just make sure the build you download/compile has ffmpeg non free codec support built in. Comes with dvd playback too.

Works perfectly on both Windows and Linux. It really is the player on steroids. Fast as hell and comes with a massive selection of output drivers/codecs. It can even play on a text based tty terminal ffs!