Playing Online Video Files in Slow Motion and Other Useful Tips
This article will help you download your favourite video clips from a number of video hosing websites like vimeo, youtube, dailymotion and some others to your computer, and play them back with VLC media player using its useful functionality and key bindings.
To download a video you can use savefrom.net free online sevrice.
If you use some flavour of GNU/Linux or BSD system on your machine you can install cclive package to download youtube videos using the command line, albeit it mostrly downloads home made video clips and very ofter returns an error if you try to download something more commercialized.
Once the video is on your computer, open it with the VLC player. Now goes the list of the default key bindings or 'hot keys' that will make you more productive with this player.
Controlling playback speed
- [ (opening square bracket)
- slows playing down, pressing the same key again will slow playing a step farther.
- ] (closing square bracket)
- increases the playback speed.
- =
- returns the playback speed to normal.
the VLC will try to keep the pitch of the sound the same as it slows the playback speed down, it does that quite succesffuly on a reasonable slowing.
Navigating
- SHIFT-Left and SHIFT-Right
- jump 3 seconds back/forward.
- META-Left and META-Right
- jump 10 seconds back/forward.
- CTRL-Left and CTRL-Right
- jump 1 minute back/forward.
- CTRL-T
- Allows to specify exact time to jump to
Misc
- SPACE
- pauses and resumes playback.
- F
- toggles between normal and full screen.
- CTRL-Up and CTRL-Down
- controls the volume of the audio.
- CTRL-Q
- Quits the player
Certainly it is far from the complete list of the key mappings, but in my opinion these ones are the most useful, to see all the hot keys go to https://wiki.videolan.org/Hotkeys.