DVD software to speed up playing a movie?

[Haopengyou]

I once read that most video could be speeded up about 3% without people knowing that there was any change in the speed. Is there DVD playing software that will do this? speed up playing the movie by 2-3% - or more?

[manono]

You're in a PAL country, aren't you? Your movies on DVD are already speeded up by over 4%.

[BobbyScot]

Unless the person wants to see his DVD movies at speed of silent films

[redwudz]

Many software players have that option to speed up or slow down playback. They sometimes use the + and - keys. But the audio will also be speeded up and at a higher pitch. You could extract out the audio and use a audio editor like Audacity to lower the pitch back to something more normal. But if you did that, you might as well re-encode the video at a different framerate to speed it up, then fix the audio to match.

What you are thinking of has been done at times to shrink the playing times of movies for TV so more commercial advertisements can be put in or to fit it within the alloted time slot. You can only get away with a few percent time shrinkage before it gets obvious. PAL<>NTSC conversions sometimes just change the framerate for the conversion and you may notice the audio pitch is wrong. (23.976fps<>25fps) I think that's around 3% - 4 %.

The newest versions of VLC player can speed up the video and apparently adjust the pitch of the audio back to normal, though I've never tried this. It's in the advanced audio settings. 'Enable time stretching audio'

This allows to play audio at lower or higher speed without affecting the audio pitch.

[Haopengyou]

Thanks! I will look into those options. I am trying to do this not only for entertainment purposes but also to help me keep up on educational materials. if I can speed up some educational stuff even as much as 10% or more, even if the pitch of the voice increases it doesn't really matter. It means that I can get through the material 10% faster If I convert the vcd/dvd to a video tape are there more options for speeding it up? I will be buying a vcr soon. I remember, once upon a time, some vcr's had a knob that would control the speed.

[redwudz]

Never tried this, but if you had a Xvid/Divx set top player, you could probably convert the DVDs to those formats and do quite a bit more with them for speeding up the audio and video. MPEG/DVDs through a set top player is a bit more limited. VirtualDub can easily change the framerate and Audacity can change the audio pitch from a 'speeded up' file. Might be a bit of work, though. I'd try a software player first and see if that will do what you want. VLC would be my first choice as it's very versatile.

[Haopengyou]

Thanks! It is amazing how much more info we have to process now that we are into the 3rd generation information age. I sometimes we we all still had manual typewriters!