:?: half-speed play with no audio pitch change?

[gregconquest]

I have a particular video, "OH! Mikey". that has very fast spoken Japanese with English subtitles. I want to play it at half-speed. I remember WinDVD or PowerDVD had this feature years ago, but I cannot find out much about it on any player now. Either this control is a specialized feature that is not widely supported, or I'm using the wrong search terms, "slow motion", "pitch change", . . .

How can I play this video at other speeds? And how can I control the pitch? I'm using ubuntu mostly (Mplayer, Totem, VLC), but I have a windows computer available too.

And since it is mostly this one video I want to play slow, is there a way to transcode it to always play slower in any player -- to basically double the file size rendering every video frame twice while doing something analogous to the audio?

Thanks for any help,
Greg Conquest

keys: linux fast audio speak quickly too quickly speaking

[guns1inger]

Audacity has a tempo change function that will let you slow it down without pitch change, then save a new version. 50% is a big ask though, so you might get some artifacts.

[gregconquest]

Thanks guns1inger, but is this all there is?

Please, someone help. The search terms are difficult for this, but I think some of you will know how to go about this...

Thanks,
Greg

[olyteddy]

I have a stand alone Panasonic Home Theater that can speed up/slow down with perfect pitch, but it can only increase or decrease by a factor of 1.1 or 1.2X. A 2X (.5X) change is asking quite a bit.

[guns1inger]

Sound Forge/Vegas has a very good filter for doing this as well, but again, a digital reduction of 50% is a big ask. You be better off looking for an old analogue tape player that can slow it down, then digitally pitch shifting the results from that.

Can I ask what is wrong with the Audacity option ?

[jman98]

Can I ask what is wrong with the Audacity option ?

It seems that the original poster wants to play the audio AND video at half speed, not just the audio. Why he wants to play the video slower is something I really don't understand since the motivation seems to be that the audio is too fast for him, but if you read his first post it does seem that he wants to slow down both and not just the audio.

I have a vague memory that the expensive Vegas program might allow him to slow down the video. I think I recall another post suggesting it could do this, but that person did not ask about a 50% reduction in speed. I suppose an AviSynth guru might could come up with a way to double the frame rate and thus slow down the video too. I am not an AviSynth guru, so I can't help here.

[gregconquest]

Yes, I want to slow down the video AND the audio while keeping the audio at the same pitch.

The subtitles tell me what is being said in English, while the voices are chatterboxing away in Japanese at incomprehensible speeds. If I can slow the whole thing down, then I can understand what is going on.

If this is difficult to do via a player, then I am perfectly willing to transcode the show.

Greg

[jman98]

There's another recent post in another forum here that says that Vegas can speed up your video to varying degrees. If it can speed it up, it might slow it down as well.

Ultimately you may need to find a Vegas specific forum to ask if it can do what you want. You may also need to post in a forum that deals with AviSynth and ask if any gurus know how to write an AviSynth script to do what you want. http://www.doom9.net has some AviSynth gurus in its forums. If you post there, please do be very explicit and state that you want to slow down both audio and video and not just audio.

[gregconquest]

OK. Thanks for the suggestions so far. I've posted the question here on Doom9's forum.

Greg

PS This issue is still open here, as far as I'm concerned. It seems to me to fit in well here.