Tips on Tech, Tools, & Traffic

Publisher’s Note

This monthly Featured Content is being created and provided by yours truly – Tanya Jones-Thibodeau – Publisher of the Gateway Gazette and founder of our Panoptic Foundations training division. I’ll be touching on a wide range of business related topics including tech, marketing, strategy, tips, and ideas.

Have a specific question or topic you’d like covered? Complete the form at the bottom of this post.

Video is great – but it can be sooooo slow!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: To get things off to the right start – let’s take a quick look at a Video Speed Controller tool I love so much that I use it daily.Check out the clip in the video at the 0:19 mark.Videos are great on so many levels, but let’s face it… most of them, mine included, don’t often need to be as long as they usually are.Not that I’m a huge fan of making myself sound like a chipmunk… but, when time is of the essence, being able to shave a couple of minutes off of the playback, or even better cutting an hour long video down to 30-40 minutes is awesome. It’s also much easier to do than you may think, by simply adding an extension tool onto your browser. I’m an avid chrome user, so that’s the extension I’m going to show you, but some of the other browsers, like Firefox, also offer similar tools. If you’re pretty comfortable with adding extensions to Chrome, go ahead and search up Video Speed Controller in your Chrome browser and give it a spin.

If you’re new to adding extensions, keep watching and I’ll walk you through the install process and how to use it.Start by simply doing a Google search for Video Speed Controller, look in the search results for the Chrome Web Store and click it.You’ll be taken directly to the page where you can install this extension and in the top right corner is a button that says “Add to Chrome”. Simply click this button and Chrome will run a check and if everything is good to go, it’ll give another little box with an “add extension” button. Just click that button, wait a minute and it’ll pop up in your address bar.That’s it. It’s ready to go. So how do you use Video Speed Controller?First, if you click on it and then click on Settings, you’ll get a screen that will show you the different keyboard shortcuts that you can use to control it.Next, if you’re currently watching a video (like this one) you may need to refresh your screen for the controls to start working.Once you find a video, you’ll see this transparent box show up in the top left corner – hover over it and click the plus sign to speed the video up a bit at a time until it’s at a speed that you can still understand.And that’s all there is to it!One caveat is that the controller may not work on all videos that you come across online and it will only work on videos playing back through your Chrome browser with this extension. If you run into problems with it working, I typically recommend closing down other tabs and refreshing your screen… and sometimes your computer may even need to be shut down and booted back up again.If you have any questions or run into any problems with this extension please leave a comment below, or consider joining our Facebook Group called Getting Going Online.Enjoy the extra time you’ll save each day with the minutes you manage to shave off your video viewing! And let me know if you like this tool!Ciao for now!

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About Tanya Jones-Thibodeau

I’m the teacher, the coach, the mentor. I’m techie, and geeky, and live technology in pretty much every way possible. I embrace new challenges and every day learn something new about technology.

Twenty-five years ago I was helping people learn how to play the piano – today I’m helping people learn how to play the computer.

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Tanya Jones-Thibodeau

The techie who speaks non-techie