Seeking recommendations for variable-speed video playback software

May 2, 2006 10:50 PM

What's a good software video player with variable-speed playback?

For quite a while now I've used Nero Showtime almost exclusively for playing videos under Windows XP. I keep Windows Media Player installed, but I rarely use it. Showtime has a series of pre-set playback speeds (1/8x to 16x or some range of increments like that) and WMP has a slider-based playback speed control that would be just the ticket if it ever worked.

I used to use some DVD-player software (either WinDVD or PowerDVD, I think) that had a very functional slider-based speed control that allowed the user to select a playback speed at any percentage of normal within a pretty broad range. I found that this control worked with AVI/MPG files as well as DVDs.

I could always re-install that DVD software, but I remember not liking it much otherwise.

Basically I'm seeing recommendations for a software video player that will let me play DixX/Xvid files and DVDs at speeds around 80%-120% of normal, with audio still accompanying the video. Preference to any program that allows the user to hide the controls while the video is in windowed mode.

I know VLC is heavily recommended by the MeFi crowds, but it seems to have pre-set playback speed increments only. If I'm wrong about this limitation of VLC or Showtime, please re-educate me.

posted by chudmonkey to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

PowerDVD does all the things you're describing, except that its playback speeds are not as granular as you say. That's the playback program I use.

It will play pretty much any video or audio file format that your system has codecs for. (I just played a WMV with it to make sure.)

Official playback speed increments are 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, 1.5x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x. Sound is played for any speed up to 2x, with the sound being stretched or compressed to match the video. Subtitles play at speeds up to 3x.

There's a different playback function as well. You can use the mouse wheel to directly control playback, with one frame for every wheel click. However, in that mode there's no sound.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:03 PM on May 2, 2006

Mplayer lets you bump speed in 10% increments (as well as doing heaps of other useful things) with keyboard controls.

It also has a command line option allowing you to set the initial playback speed to anything you like, and it maintains sound output even when running ridiculously fast or slow (you can make pr0n sound like whales, if that's your thing :)
posted by flabdablet at 11:30 PM on May 2, 2006

BSPlayer lets you set the output speed in one-percent increments -- you can assign a keystroke to +/- 1% and +/- 10%.

It also has an option in the settings for "borderless playback window" which essentially means you just get a plain rectangle of video with absolutely no adornments (aside from the player itself which is a separate window that you can show/hide separately.) I love this feature for having video running in the background while doing other things as the controls don't take up any screen area.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:08 AM on May 3, 2006

Seconding flabdablet's suggestion. You can configure the size of the increments if you need finer control. The only limitation on the speed while keeping the audio is that it pretends the audio samplerate of the input is something appropriate to keep it in sync, and then up/downsamples it to your output samplerate: this means that as only the supported samplerates between 8khz and 192khz are possible, you can't go slower than 0.17x or faster than 4x with normal 48khz audio (but judging by your question, that shouldn't be a problem).

Oh, and oddly enough, there's no pitch correction filter.
posted by fvw at 4:08 AM on May 3, 2006