Playback speed past X2 is now a YouTube paid feature
1mon 11d ago by lemmy.world/u/cosmicrookie in mildlyinfuriating
via this comment from @Imnecomrade@lemmygrad.ml
laughs in NewPipe
Laughs in Grayjay
For people on „ios“ Unwatched app is good
This was a good tip, cheers!
Screw anyone who supports their little walled Apple garden of control by owning their products.
nah owned by futo and fuck them https://drewdevault.com/2025/10/22/2025-10-22-Whats-up-with-FUTO.html
Last I heard grayjay made the choice not to include sponsorblock
sponsorblock is included alongside a comment that you should support creators
Laughs in Firefox, which allows plug-ins in mobile. I can have all my ad blockers and video speed controllers, and anything else.
You should give NewPipe or Tubular (NewPipe fork with sponsor blocker) a try, it provides a better user experience.
Lol nope, out of principle I will never pay for this even if I didn't already hate Google.
It feels so condescending to the user, so unconcerned with their agency that I could never bring myself to support this choice with even a tiny amount of money.
100% agree. The problem is that there are more and more features that get tugged behind the subscription paywall
Same here. I’m sick of seeing people say stuff like “just pay for Premium bro”. Stfu. That’s like paying the mafia for “protection” from them. YouTube created these problems and now I have to pay them to fix it? Fuck no.
Download it and play it however you want in VLC.
It was never a free feature; they used to only allow up to 2X speed. Not that that justifies it at all of course.
Wdym? I can literally increase to 5x speed on my YouTube client for free rn
I could also only increase the playback speed to 2x at maximum. Firefox and no YouTube specific add-ons are used.
I can barely follow and absorb anything at 1.5-2x.
Beyond that, more power to you.
Yeah, this change has no practical effect on me. But removing and paywalling features is concerning nonetheless.
Speeds over 2x were never a free feature, they just used to not be an option at all.
I'm ADHD and I can't do it. XD
For extremely slow speakers 3x is possible.
Yeah, 2x is normally my limit, sometimes 2.5x. Very occasionally there will be content that gets 3x or more, but it's incredibly rare. It has to be something pretty slow.
Stallman speeches are optimal at 2.5-3x
Some lectures and instruction videos are only watchable at 4x or higher.
Luckily there's extensions and alternative apps that provide a much better user experience than the default one, including being able to increase playback speed as much as you want.
That's so stupid it feels like satire. But I guess it's not too surprising.
I have my own speed control that I can adjust or enter max speed for.
Wait until they find some stupid way to lock down Chrome extensions. I just know they will.
This extension is for Firefox. Get off the chrome platform in all the places you can
Exactly. We better stop using Chrome. I mean, we should stop using Google products altogether. But for YouTube, it's impossible to find an alternative that has the same content.
You can use yt-dlp to download it and play it in whatever movie player you want that supports variable speeds, unless and until YouTube cracks down on downloading.
I use jdownloader2. I think it uses yt-dl on the backend though? Like the original yt-dl. I'm not sure.
I was curious so I downloaded the Mac version of yt-dlp (as I am on Mac), couldn't get it to run. And I'm comfortable with the command line.
YouTube kinda is cracking down on downloading though. If a video is marked as adult (you need to sign in to view it), it can't be downloaded. A lot of "official videos" (like trailers from the studio) can't be downloaded. Subtitles can't be downloaded. That's in jd2. Not sure about yt-dlp.
I think it uses yt-dl on the backend though? Like the original yt-dl.
You're probably thinking of youtube-dl. I'd guess that it most-likely used that at one point, but probably switched to yt-dlp when YouTube started throttling single-stream downloads.
Yt-dlp all those work, though you may need log in (cookie) for 'adult' content
But i dl with subtitles every time '--write-auto-subs' or '--write-subs en' or 'all', also got '--convert-subs srt' yt-dlp the goat
Nice, but that doesn't work on my machine as of yet.
It's weird that the default archive utility we (Mac users) all use (The Unarchiver) can't do .7z files, but if they're downloaded through jdownloader2, they unzip just fine. The actual 7-Zip application is only available as a command line interface on Mac, whereas on Windows, as you probably know, it's more like a file manager.
One of these days I'll get yt-dlp working on my Mac. Even being in the same folder as it, typing yt-dlp in the terminal doesn't open it. That's how it worked in DOS/Windows (or you had it in a folder you declared in PATH= in Autoexec.bat, back in the day), but Mac/UNIX terminal is something I have very little experience in. Comfortable with it, but inexperienced. So I suppose I have some reading to do. Especially if the subs work as well as you say.
Aye yeah that's fair, in that case i'd recommend PeaZip, it's what I use on my CachyOS setup since 7zip is just cli on Unix. PeaZip has a nice file manager UI.
In terms of yt-dlp it really depends how you installed it...
Assuming you're in the folder where yt-dlp is:
1. Make it executable
chmod +x yt-dlp
2. Run it directly from the current folder
./yt-dlp --version
If that works, then the binary is fine and it’s just a PATH thing.
I'd recommend just installing it through Homebrew personally, it will sort out the PATH for you automatically.
install Homebrew if you don't have it (from brew.sh)
then:
brew install yt-dlp
yt-dlp --version
Otherwise if you want to make the binary work (if you already have the file or want to download it manually)
Open the folder in terminal and then
move it somewhere on PATH
sudo mv yt-dlp /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp
make sure it’s executable
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp
Now whichever way you choose, you should be able to just do:
yt-dlp https://example.com/video --write-auto-subs
Along with whatever other commands you want to use!
Thanks! Should have known I could install it with brew. I installed that pretty early on. It's now updating a bunch of stuff because I really don't use it that much.
I think some of your commands are Linux-specific but I'm going with the homebrew installation.
Is now a paid feature?
Was playback over 2x (through the official app) ever supported for free?
Why and what type of videos are you watching at 2x speed?
Idk what to tell you, a lot of youtubers talk pretty fuckin slow
Listening to people talk faster gives me anxiety. It’s the closest thing (I guess) to feeling like I have ADHD. Like I’ve done a bunch of speed but without any of the dopaminergic effects.
I don’t know how anybody does it to be quite honest. Even putting a podcast on 1.25x is too much. It’s like I know they are talking faster than they should and it makes me feel cracked out.
I watch basically everything that isn't music or advanced mathematics at 2x speed. YouTubers talk so slowly.
That's what I wanted to know. Until I realised I don't care how people watch YouTube and that it's more annoying to me that Google is paywalling something that costs them nothing to implement.
I watch most IT/Technical videos at 1.5-2x speed. Especially tutorial style videos. Most creators use a very long and drawn out way of speaking in order to keep the viewer on the same page, but most of the time I know the core concepts already, so I don't need the super detailed parts only the barebones.
This was a video of a machine treating pomegranate seeds 🤷 don't ask
But it was filmed in a lot of detail and there was no need to watch the whole thing. The creators should probably have made a highlights video instead.
I don't know what YouTube does when you increase playback speed, but a lot of people who listen to podcast-type material or lectures will use software that has the ability to time-stretch the playback without changing the pitch. That is, we can often understand people perfectly well speaking more quickly than they actually do.
I imagine that some people are most-likely looking at content of that sort on YouTube.
That's interesting they can keep the pitch. Thanks
It's for people who want to skim but not to read.
I would give anything to skim an article rather than sit through a 10 minute video for the one thing I need to know.
Use the transcript and skip/read through
It's on every youtube video at the bottom of the description!
Work shit.
That i can see
$ yt-dlp <URL>
I am not one to fear the terminal, but do people actually use this to browse YT? What does this workflow look like? Searching video URLs, manually copying them into this cli, and then opening the downloaded file?
No, it isn't useful to browse.
I use it for grabbing low quality music and 'subscribing' to various channels (checks and downloads new videos every 10m) in order to avoid having to give the algorithm my eyeballs.
If you just want to scroll, something like FreeTube would do what you want. It blocks ads and has sponsorblock built-in. You can subscribe to videos via the app (which is all stored locally, not in any account, you don't have to log-in.)
Check out MeTube. It is just a wrapper for ytp-dl. You can set extention in a way that only icon needs to be clicked. Everything is automated. No need to do anything in CLI.
$('video').playbackRate = 3;
What do you watch on that speed? Genuine question, not saying it's not a shitty arbitrary restriction
Not OP but informational podcast/interview type videos that are heavy on talking and long I watch at 2.25x with subtitles on.
Interesting, I do 1.5x for certain podcasts and tabletop like Critical Role, but even at that speed I miss things and lose comprehension (although I am usually multitasking as well)
Makes sense, in other contexts I'd watch at lower speeds (I watch starcraft games sometimes at 1.25x), but for me this is kind of like the video equivalent of skimming an article, actively reading and listening at the same time and not multitasking. I also manually skip around to get to relevant information faster.
I'd also like to mention that I'm able to do this because I use FreeTube, not because I pay for YouTube...
For me personally, until a month ago I had no idea why people would prefer to watch at faster speed.
Then I was assigned 10 hours of training at work, and it was all the worst fucking videos you've ever seen, no editing for clarity or brevity, points being repeated ad nausea. Repeating footage. And it's not like I could skip vast portions of it, I never knew when a little piece of key information would be snuck in which was in the knowledge test.
Finally said to myself fuck this and I put it on 2x. I found it kind of life-changing in that moment and I'm going to consider using faster watch speeds from now on.
Ive experienced that too :) These companies that make training videos for employees, seems like anyone could succeed there. Literally no quality, but thats fine, the manager gets his checkbox checked, all employees trained.
In this case, it was this video
https://youtu.be/0aQM69ZuS5M
I don't usually speed it up that much bun in this case, I wanted a 'time lapse' stile skim of the video
Yeah Google has been "toll-bridging" features into paid-premium since removal of ability to pause with screen off in YouTube.
I wouldnt be surprised if corporate greed forces them to remove pausing videos altogether. Not premium can't pause!
I don't care when my only way to watch YouTube it's either:
- on Firefox with uBlock Origin
- on ReVanced
- on SmartTube (for Android TV)
- by downloading the video through yt-dlp
Don't give them ideas
This is why I am just going to pay networks of my favorite youtubers directly when YouTube finally gets too bad to use. I'm never paying for RedTube or whatever the fuck porny ass name their premium service has so that Google gets most of my money and Mr beast gets a cut while the people I actually watch get nothing. I pay for Dropout already and that shit is so much better than Netflix and other services. Sure it's low budget but it's still better than the slop all the big companies are shoveling out of their troughs.
Then it'll become a premium feature to choose your videos otherwise you'll have to consult a personalised video guide to see when the videos you want to watch will be playing.
Pretty much a traditional tv
corporate greed
There's no way YouTube is even remotely profitable even with the massive amounts of ads on the free version..
They're almost certainly one of the more profitable Google services or they'd have been cut loose by now.
Google serves ads, YouTube is a great platform for them to serve ads, and they don't even have to pay content creators that much, because they serve their own ads. The biggest expense is probably bandwidth and memory, which Google owns enough of to sell off bits they aren't using.
Just gonna leave this here (for desktop at least): https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed
Been like this for awhile now.
For android use revanced or morphe
For browser use firefox and video speed controller
So infuriating... Sadly, I can't even boycott YouTube because of how much good content it has
Note: Btw, don't think that I'm one of those normies who use YouTube on its official app with my account logged in and definitely don't think I'm a normie that doesn't use an ad-blocker
Personally i only use youtube to doomscroll "shorts" because I don't have facebook, instagram or tik tok for that. It's really no pleasure as such, but a good way to just turn wind down.
My main issue is that most of the information and knowledge that i used to get from reading blog posts, or forum threads, has become videos, with the majority of the content being irellevant
You can try Morphe on your phone and SmartTube on your TV.
That's still YouTube 😹😹
That way there are no ads and no fees, you become (in theory) a net negative to Google.
Not interested in those apps because I watch YouTube in Brave and it's giving me the best experience compared to other alternatives. Why are y'all thinking I'm a normie who watches YouTube on its official app with my account logged in and with all the ads
Edit: No hate to you though
I know. Unfortunately the alternatives are pay-to-win (Odysee) or political (Rumble).
That's exactly why I posted the main comment in the first place lol. I can replace Google Search by switching to other search engines but in terms of YouTube, there's no competitor that is better or equal to it in terms of quality content
Use Firefox and ublock Origin to remove ads.
I pay for premium in a group of 6. We pay like 6€ each and get YouTube Music on top.
People are too used to free stuff. The amount of bandwidth YouTube requires is absolutely mindboggingly huge and can't possibly be profitable.
bandwidth should be nationalized or otherwise a municipal public utility so people can compete easier tbh. We do this with roads, water, electricity, etc. Get libertarians on board with data privacy insurances at the federal level so big brother cant spy on public bandwidth. Massie and Rand Paul could buck for that
Youtube ad revenue: 8,9 billion USD
Total profit from services: 30,9 billion USD
Yeah bandwidth is not that expensive
Yeah, it's generally not a profitable business. But not when people make accounts, use those accounts to watch content and also comment and like-dislike content. They track your every move. They're an ad company and that's how they make a profit. I would have paid a subscription for the service if they were a honest company and didn't invade other people's privacy without their permission.
Look man, there are a lot of ways to use YouTube and have a great experience. You don't need to pay money to them just to have a good experience. Just use YouTube in Brave Browser or Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled or maybe with an ad-block enabled on your device 🤷 Well, just my suggestion. You're free to do as you like
...what? Go do something else instead of watching YouTube-style content then. Read a book. Take up knitting. Do crosswords.
You can live a full life without Internet videos.
Use FreeTube and Tubular lmao
They found out a simple tampermonkey script could speed the ads up to 16x
Use Revanced if you're on android
I am at the point where you tube is now a rare choice. I am tired of the stupid games and adblock and trying to not log in.
Fuck it, I can do without.
revanced and smarttube
Not sure if this still works but, the YouTube version I had, mobile YouTube vanced, there’s a loophole to bypass the “premium 2x speed”. It basically getting to video settings as quickly as possible.
These steps work on the YouTube vanced app on android. I don’t know what versions you’re on so it may not work.
When you open a video immediately open the video settings then click your playback settings, then select the 2x speed. On android, YouTube video buffer briefly before loading up at the very beginning, and if you successfully manage to click the playback settings it should load the old YouTube playback settings where the it listed the different speed in a column. If not, as in you were too slow to open the video settings, you can always try again. You just have to close the video and open it again using YouTube history, and again try getting to the video playback settings asap.
This is only the beginning...
The beginning‽ They've been up to shit like this for years!
Not if you know JavaScript...
Enshitification Nation.
I highly recommend the extension “Enhancer for YouTube” by Max RF, it adds a shit Tom of qol features
I skip ads by just hitting f5 until they stop.
Why not just use ad blocker?
Don't bother doing that. Just switch to Firefox, install uBlock Origin and you're golden.
Just use ReVanced
Lots of ways around this, even on locked down iOS/iPadOS
Like..?
I use a safari plugin called Wipr. There’s another I’m aware of called Vinegar
https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube
I was able to do 2x speed on brave browser app on my phone. Must be ad or something
You better learn to read better, son.
Are you afraid to say what you mean? I don't pay for YouTube.
3-times the speed is a paid feature, not 2
There you go. I don't get the option to of playback speeds of more than 2x. 2x is the limit and I never came across that screen
Your weakness disgusts me. I can x5 a video.
Witness the power of 8x speed wth ReVanced!!!
This is madness
My phone can't decode YouTube's WebM above 90 fps at 480p and 60 fps at 720p without a huge framedrop. The audio works fine though.