As part of preparing for an upcoming talk, I’m working on a talk which includes a video. As part of adding the video to my Keynote slides I thought that increasing the playback speed would help with the pacing of the talk but I didn’t see a way in Keynote to have that happen as part of the video’s playback without having to manually run the video.

After some research, I found a straightforward way to use the open-source VLC video tool to double the playback speed of a video and save the changes. For more details, please see below the jump.

Pre-requisites:

• VLC
• Video file in an input format understood by VLC

To have VLC read a video file and save it as a new file which plays at twice the speed of the original file, please use the process below:

1. Open VLC
2. Under the File menu, select Convert / Stream…

3. In the Convert & Stream window, click the Open media… button.

4. Select the video where you want to increase the playback speed.
5. Select the video profile you want. (In this case, I’m selecting the default option: Video – H.264 + MP3 (MP4) )
6. Click the Customize… button

7. Set the Scale option to 2.

8. Click the Apply button.

9. In the Choose Destination section of the Convert & Stream window, click the Save As File button.

10. Choose the name and location to save the sped-up file.

10. Click the Save button.

VLC will then do the following:

1. List the file in its playlist.
2. Play back the original file at two times normal speed.
3. Record the original file’s playback to the new file. In this case, because I chose the Video – H.264 + MP3 (MP4) profile, the new file is saved as an .m4v file.