How to Control the Playback Speed of YouTube Videos

Hi Crocheters! I’ve had some questions lately about how to control the playback speed for YouTube videos.

I thought I would create a quick post to show you how to control the playback speed.

When you are watching your YouTube video, click on the Settings Wheel in the bottom-right corner of the video screen.

It looks like this:

Step 1: Click on the little settings wheel icon.

Step 2: Click on the Speed option.

Step 3: Choose the speed you would prefer. The numbers above Normal, 0.75, 0.5 and 0.25 will slow the video down significantly. So if there is a part you need to see but the video is going to quickly, select one of those options and rewatch that section. If you want to speed the video up because you are in a rush or the person is dreadfully slow (or you want to hear them talk like a chipmunk lol), select the options below the Normal level. You can always change it back to Normal at any time too 🙂

Step 4: If you do speed it up to 2 or slow it down to 0.25 times the original speed, you may not want the audio playing. It can be rather annoying to hear chipmunks and sloths talk for long periods of time 😉 So you can mute the volume and then click that settings icon wheel again. In the options that display (see above) you will see the Subtitles section appear. Click on Subtitles and select English (auto-generated), or another language option if you need it. For crochet videos they don’t always get all the words right when they are auto-generated, but most of them come through properly. You can always go into settings again and turn the subtitles off once you start watching the video at regular speed again.

Another setting I want to briefly mention is the Quality Setting (see the blue arrow above).

You can change the settings for the video playback by clicking on the Quality button. This allows you to make the video clearer (if YouTube does not automatically select the right level for you – which happens for me sometimes) or you can make it more compatible with your video player device on your computer.

If the video is loading really slowly for you it may be because your computer’s video player only allows playback at lower levels. I film my video on 1080p HD but some people can put videos up in 4K now too which may not work if you have an older device. You can change the quality of the video to a lower setting and get a smoother playback on your computer in the Quality Setting. The video may become a bit more grainy due to the lower quality but it will not be as jumpy 🙂

I hope this helps!!