speed-up viewing, for large files

[smurfix]

I often need to scan for relevant scenes in large videos. In order to do this efficiently and not miss things, this I'd like a way to speed up the viewer.

For the UI I'd suggest that, while the video is playing, the mouse wheel could be re-purposed to multiply/divide the current rate with something like ∜2, thus scrolling up four ticks would speed up the video by two. In addition, when the playback speed is below 10%, scrolling further down could skip back half a second or so.

[ozmartian]

Thats what the "Seeking" option is for. Go to Settings > General > Seeking (section at the bottom) and you can set the skip duration, in seconds, for the UP/DOWN and SHIFT + UP/DOWN keys for broader range seeking. Defaults are set at 2 and 5 secs.

[smurfix]

That doesn't particularly help when the scene is less than two seconds long. In my case I needed to assemble all views out of a certain window. Easily accomplished with 150%…250% view speed (depending on scenes; I was using LosslessCut, which unfortunately doesn't do re-encoding when cut points don't match keyframes), not reliably possible with skip-ahead.

It's also a problem of human cognition, which deals with skip-ahead far less well than with a speed-up IMHO.

[vertigo220]

Seeking is not a sufficient replacement for this, as even short seeks can result in missing something you're looking for, and if they're too short, it will still take forever to move through a video, whereas making them longer to speed things up will increase the odds of missing something. Also, it's much more visually and cognitively jarring, and therefore more difficult, to move quickly through a video by repeatedly jumping/seeking than by simply playing at a faster speed. I can go through a video faster and more accurately at say 3-4x speed than I can by jumping over and over 3-5 seconds at a time.

Also, duplicate of #201.