How To Play WWDC Sessions at 2x Speed

Now that all the new bits of iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 are in the wild you might find yourself wanting to get up to speed on some of the changes. One great resource to help you get started is Apple’s WWDC videos.

The WWDC video library has a lot going for it: HD and SD video sizes, slide downloads and now even full text search! The only real negative thing is the sheer amount of content out there. It can get overwhelming and time consuming to watch all the stuff you are interested in. Here’s the hint. Like podcasts, WWDC videos are mostly single voices speaking one at a time and if you have the tools to double the playback speed you’ll find them still very comprehensible.

Now for the tools. For downloading you can of course use the Apple website. I like this WWDC Mac app as well. Once you have the video file on your hard drive you’ll unfortunately need to look for something beside the built-in QuickTime player to help. Even with all its enhancements it sadly doesn’t have this tool of QuickTime’s past. The good news is you can still download QuickTime 7 and it works great!

After you open your movie in QuickTime 7 (you’ll find it installed in the Utilities folder), use the Window menu and choose Show A/V Controls. In this panel you’ll see a slider that let’s you adjust the playback speed.

Now you can watch your chosen WWDC videos in half of the time! Enjoy!

UPDATE: My thanks to Paul Brown who let me know that the native QuickTime player can playback faster, even if it is a little hidden. To increase playback speed, bring up the controls with your mouse, then option-click on the fast-forward control. This will increment playback speed by 10% each time you click. You can keep clicking this up to 2.0x playback speed but sadly the audio does not work at 2.0x, you’ll have to limit yourself to 1.9x to retain the faster audio. Thanks again for the help Paul!