

Lecture overclocking - herdrick
http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/11/overclocking-lecture.html

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idlewords
If only there were a way to convey information in some kind of compact
symbolic visual format that everyone could parse at their own desired speed.

~~~
Periodic
I'm doing this for a Database Systems course I'm currently taking. Sadly, the
lecture notes are terrible. They're basically just visualizations for him to
talk to and convey little to no information on their own. As such they're not
only hard to read ahead with, but hard to use to review.

As such, it's back to the textbook for me!

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huffer
Wow, I'm astonished how this seems such a good and unchallenged idea to you,
guys! And you guys were so fond of the 'Teach yourself programming in 10
years' the other day... There is an inverse linear dependency between the
speed of swallowing information and how deep it penetrates your skull... I
mean, the (good) lecture already contains a great concentration of information
and knowledge that you need to thoroughly review (ideally from different
angles while throwing in additional info and reason of your own).

Playing Defense Towers etc. while you're listening to a lecture? I understand
that this technique is the cure for that but really, if you started by viewing
the lectures while playing, my assessment is that you were not taking things
seriously. And the whole idea that creeps out is that you're on a lecture-
viewing marathon, trying to beat some sort of record...

You know, sometimes less is more...

~~~
ZeroGravitas
It's often claimed by speed-readers that the faster you take in the info the
more you understand, because you get to a point where you have a cohesive
overview faster.

I've never heard anyone claim that slower intake was necessarily better and if
it was then you'd be able to use the same technique to slow down a lecture to
take twice as long.

~~~
huffer
A fast overview of the information laid out before you can mean indeed that
you can grasp some high-level concepts before you loose your focus within the
details. But it can mean no more than a summary, and maybe it can give you the
intuition of where to focus more for the details (depending on the context and
your personal approach); but this is usually limited to a very small segment
of the presented info.

On the other hand, when I meant 'slow' I was not referring to the mechanics of
the video, I was referring to the pace of acquiring the information, the
meaning behind the spoken words/images succession. I think the fast-paced
reception of the information can lead only to an illusion of understanding;
pausing the video from time to time in order to look up for more information
elsewhere, rewinding some sections, etc. were closer to what I had in mind,
not the slowing down of the video, as you apparently understood. I'm sorry I
was not clear enough the first time, I hope now I mended my argument a
little...

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nose
You can increase the playback speed in VLC player.

If you're using a mac, press ⌥ ⌘ →

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niels_olson
I started the podcasting program at Tulane med school after Katrina. The
informal consensus then (late 2005, early 2006, until the present) was that
1.5x was about right.

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jackfoxy
I got turned on to overclocking lectures from Peteris Krumins’ blog,
[http://www.catonmat.net/blog/how-to-save-time-by-watching-
vi...](http://www.catonmat.net/blog/how-to-save-time-by-watching-videos-at-
higher-playback-speeds/) Then I wrote a .NET Windows forms wrapper program
around his method that controls the speed and pitch. Overclocking lectures is
the only way to go.

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chaosmachine
I used to joke about playing all my music back at 105% speed. Over an average
life span, you'd hear 21 CDs for every 20 normal people heard.

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pkeane
When I was in college, taking a Shakespeare course, it was standard practice
to go up to the music library (where they had LPs of nice productions of the
plays) and listen at 45 rpms while reading along in the Riverside Shakespeare.
Worked quite well.

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ews
You can do the same on mplayer on linux, pressing [ and ] to speed up / down
the lecture. Being a non native English speaker, my current comfort zone is
between 1.40 - 1.60 x.

~~~
vixate
And to change the speed without changing the pitch, the "scaletempo" audio
filter works pretty well:

    
    
        $ mplayer -af scaletempo filename

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pkrumins
I wrote about it a while ago as well. My solution is to use AviSynth. And I
created examples of how a lecture sounds like from 1x to 3x.

"How to Save Time by Watching Videos at Higher Playback Speeds"

[http://www.catonmat.net/blog/how-to-save-time-by-watching-
vi...](http://www.catonmat.net/blog/how-to-save-time-by-watching-videos-at-
higher-playback-speeds/)

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ryanwaggoner
It would be nice to do this with Mixergy, but I don't see a way to download
the videos. I guess I could do it with the audio...

~~~
there
on a page like <http://mixergy.com/daniel-brusilovsky/>, there is an "original
video" link under the "embed this video" link.

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Periodic
Does anyone have any good tricks for downloading WMV videos at faster than
real-time? The Stanford Videos come as WMV or Silverlight, and it seems I
can't get them to download any faster than real time. VLC has an option to
write out to a file as it plays, but even without locally showing the video it
doesn't speed up.

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mey
You could also use VLC (on windows) to play back the video at more then 1.0x
speed.

~~~
Periodic
Quicktime and VLC and MPlayer, and just about any reasonably well-featured
video player will have the feature to adjust the playback speed.

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gojomo
At <[http://bloggingheads.tv>](http://bloggingheads.tv>), their in-page flash
video viewer offers 1.4X pitch-corrected playback -- but they may be
accomplishing that by toggling to a second pre-accelerated video server-side.

It's crazy that more sites, and especially sites with lots of lectures like
Google Video, don't offer this option.

~~~
sketerpot
I always use the 1.4x feature at BloggingHeads.tv, and it's amazing. The talk
usually gets more engaging and easier to understand because you're paying more
attention. It's not at all hard to understand people.

This definitely needs to become standard. In fact, one of the major reasons
I'm rooting for HTML5 video replacing flash video is so that a browser can add
this functionality.

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ZeroGravitas
This should be a standard feature of HTML5 audio and video support. I believe
the Webkit-GTK guys are already working on it with their gstreamer backend.

