I'm using VLC ("VideoLAN") on Linux to play 4k video I have recorded. I'm trying to quickly review long segments so I want to play the video faster, at least 5x. But when I exceed 2.9x the video immediately hangs and I am unable to recover. If I reduce the speed, seek, anything I have tried does not fix the issue of video no longer playing. The only thing that fixes it is to exit the program and restart it. If I play slower, above 2.0x but under 2.9x, then it does the same thing after a few seconds. I have played around with the buffering settings to no effect. It doesn't matter how big the window is; I get the same behavior even if I shrink it down substantially.
I have tried Gnome MPV and it doesn't freeze up, but despite the playback speed it doesn't seem to actually be honoring the requested rate. For instance, when I have it set to playback at 5x, it seems to be closer to 2x.
The only way I have found to reliably watch video faster is to upload it to Google Photos, then wait for it to be available at 4k, then play it back. But this requires a lot of waiting (sometimes Google Photos doesn't make my original 4k video available for playing at 4k for several days) and it also requires a fast connection in order to avoid stalling. (My home connection is not fast enough). But when it works, it plays perfectly, smooth video at 5x.
I tried mplayer, but it seems to completely ignore whatever speed I tell it (either via the command line, e.g. "-speed 5 -af scaletempo" or via the keyboard shortcuts, and only ever plays at 1x speed!?!
How can I locally play my video at these playback speeds?
As a workaround I thought maybe I could use FFMPEG to re-encode it into a new video. Using this answer I came up with this command:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter:v "setpts=PTS/5" -an output.mp4
But this is only encoding about 2 frames per second and my first video alone is about 30 minutes which means I would have to wait 7.5 hours.
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