VLC has a really neat feature which consists of time-stretching audio to allow users to speed up or slow video playback with the [ and ] keys without affecting the pitch of the sound. I recently switched to Kodi as my video player of choice and I was looking for the equivalent feature.

Kodi equivalent

To enable this feature in Kodi, you first need to enable Sync playback to display in Settings | Player | Videos.

Then map the tempoup and tempodown commands to the same keyboard shorcuts as VLC.

In my case however, I wanted to map these functions to buttons on my Streamzap remote and so I put the following in my ~/.kodi/userdata/keymaps/remote.xml:

  <FullscreenVideo>
    <remote>
      <pageminus>PlayerControl(tempodown)</pageminus>
      <pageplus>PlayerControl(tempoup)</pageplus>
    </remote>
  </FullscreenVideo>

which allows me to press the Ch + and Ch - buttons on the remote to adjust the speed while the video is playing (in full-screen mode only, not with the menu displayed).

Examples

Here are three ways I use this functionality:

• I set it to 0.9x for movies in languages I'm not totally proficient in.
• I set it to 1.1x for almost everything since the difference is not especially perceptible, but it still allows me to watch 10% more movies in the same amount of time
• I set it to 1.2x for Rick & Morty because it makes Rick even more hilariously reckless and impatient.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to set the default tempo value. The closest setting I could find is the one which allows you to set the maximum tempo value maxtempo. If you know of a way, please leave a comment!