How to watch high speed let's plays on London Underground

Apparently the idea that some places - like London trains - are offline - never occurred to anyone in California or Seattle or wherever people who write mobile software tend to live. And even support for high speed playback is not quite as common as it should be.

So I came up with a process to deal with it - which even with all the scripts to automate it still has far too many steps. I'm not saying I recommend it to anyone, but maybe someone needs to do something similar, and they might use it as a starting point.

Download let's plays

First, let's find a bunch of let's plays we want to watch, it's best to use playlists instead of individual videos to reduce URL copy and pasting time, but it works for both.

To download them we can use youtube-dl, which is available as a homebrew package (brew install youtube-dl), or you can get it from here.

$ youtube-dl -t -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best"

  "url1" "url2" "url3"

Youtube offers videos in many formats, and arguments above are what I found to result in highest quality and best compatibility with various video players. Default settings often ended up causing issues.

Speed up the videos

There's plenty of command line tools to manipulate audio and video, and they tend to have ridiculously complicated interfaces.

I wrote speedup_mp3 script (available in my unix-utilities repository) which wraps all such tools to provide easy speedup of various formats - including of video files.

The script uses ffmpeg to speedup videos - as well as sox and id3v2 to deal with audio files if you need to do so to some podcasts. All those dependencies you can satisfy with brew install ffmpeg sox id3v2.

The script can speedup a whole directory of downloaded videos at once by 2.0x factor:

$ speedup_mp3 -2.0 downloaded_videos/ fast_videos/

Adjust that number to your liking. Factors higher than 2.0 are not currently supported, as ffmpeg requires multiple speedup rounds in such case. I plan to add support for that later.

The process takes a lot of time, so it's best left overnight to do its thing.

The script already skips videos which exist in target directory, so you can add more videos to the source, run it again, and it won't redo videos it already converted.

Put them on Dropbox

Infuriatingly there doesn't seem to be any good way to just send files to Android tablet from a laptop over WiFi. There used to be some programs, but they got turned into microtransaction nonsense.

If you already use Dropbox, the easiest way is to put those sped up files there. This step is a bit awkward of course, as video files are big, people's upload speeds are often low, and free Dropbox plan is pretty small.

If that doesn't discourage you, open Dropbox app on your tablet, and use checkbox to make your files available offline. You don't need to wait for it to finish syncing, Dropbox should keep updating files as they get uploaded.

After that any video player works. I use VLC. Just open Dropbox folder, click on the video, it will open in VLC and play right away. First time you do it, make sure to set VLC as default app to avoid an extra dialog.

Isn't this ridiculously overcomplicated?

Yeah, it sort of is. Some parts of it will probably get better - for example speed controls on video/audio playback are getting more common, so you could skip that part (watching at 100% speed is of course totally silly). It still makes some sense to pre-speedup to save space and battery on the device, as faster files are proportionally smaller, but if you feel it's not worth the hassle, you can probably find a video player with appropriate functionality.

TfL showed zero interest in fixing lack of connectivity on London underground, and mobile ecosystem assumes you're always online or everything breaks, so this part will probably be a major pain point for very long time.

The part I find most embarrassing is lack of any builtin way to just send files over to a device. Hopefully this gets fixed soon.