How to play DVDs at faster than normal rate?

[Steve Pavlina]

Is there any convenient software that can play back DVDs at faster than normal speed, automatically pitch-adjusting the audio to compensate?

I know Windows Media Player can do this with audio files (along with some other audio players), but Media Player doesn't seem to offer that capability for video.

The reason I ask is that I have hundreds of hours of audio programs and DVDs in my queue to evaluate. I normally listen to the audio programs at 2x speed, which saves me many hours of listening. I'd like to be able to do the same for DVDs if possible.

Any suggestions?

[Adam]

Media Player does do speed adjustment on some mpeg video files, depending on what codec it was encoded in. I'm not certain which codecs can be sped up, though.

To speed up a DVD, you would have to rip it first, which is a *very* gray area in the current copyright laws... even if it is for your personal use. It depends on what licenses / copyright warnings are on the DVD. The standard DVD format, though, isn't encoded to be able to be sped up.

[RT Wolf]

You can control pitch with equalizers, it might take a little fiddling around, but in theory, you could manually play with the equalizer to get the thing to sound ok. That is, after you've found a way to get the thing to play faster than real-time while still outputting audio.

[Steve Pavlina]

These are personal development DVDs sent to me directly by speakers and publishers to evaluate. They aren't going to care if I rip them to my PC in order to give them a faster turnaround. Most of them are seminar/workshop recordings.

[RT Wolf]

Occasionally you might not have to rip the DVD, to test whether you need to, try this: if you open a DVD in My computer, there's usually two folders, inside hte Video_TS folder, there'll be a whole buncha files, including some big ones with the extension .vob. Copy them onto your computer and change the extension to .mpg or .mpeg and try to play them like regular video files, which is essentially what they are, and see if that works. This doesn't always work due to encryption or how the DVD was created, but it can save some time versus ripping them.

If not, then you'll prolly have to rip the DVDs, for which there is info here:

How to Rip DVDs - WikiHow

Alternative (easier) way: DVDShrink DVD Shrink freeware download

HTH!

[Rod Logan]

Just grab a copy of Cyberlink PowerDVD v7. In my eyes, nothing compares to this program for DVD playback.

You can hear audio from 0.5X to 2X playback speed without pitch distortion. This feature is especially useful for language learning. With the combination of A-B repeat and dual-subtitle technologies, PowerDVD offers a complete language learning platform.

[RT Wolf]

I'm grave digging, but if you've still got this problem, the latest version of VLC Player allows you to do this. It works really well, actually, I've been using it a lot for personal development stuff lately and the occasional boring movie .

VLC media player - Open Source Multimedia Framework and Player

[James81]

Check out the program "VirtualDJ." I'm not sure if you can actually use songs off of a CD, but I do know that you can put mp3 files into it and slow them down or speed them up as you please.

The fun thing with this program is that not only can you do that, but you can mix and record two songs together and make them one. (the idea is to take an instrumental version of one song and an a capella version of another and mix them together to make a remix)

But the program can speed up sound files. And I'm willing to bet you can use the files from CDs in it, although I haven't tried that yet.

[James81]

Well, ****, my fingers are moving faster than my brain this morning.

I could've sworn you said CDs. What the hell? Time for another cup of coffee. lol