Comment by IkmoIkmo

Agreed. I actually run all my 'speech' (e.g. presentation, tutorial etc) videos at 1.5x or 2x. Cutting a 30 minute video down to 15 is really, really awesome. Particularly when the guy speaks slowly, when he already speaks fast I'll do 1.25x or 1.5x.

I do this on youtube and things like treehouse. The reason I tend to watch youtube on my tablet in the browser and not the app is because the app doesn't allow this and my brain goes numb.

That having been said, I really love video for some things. For example, I'd much rather listen to Greenwald's speech at Brown on civil liberties than read the equivalent article. I tend to clean my room or play Pro Evolution Soccer while doing so and somehow that works brilliantly. I can't quite keep the same concentration when I read for 30 minutes.

But it really depends. If I want to look up some code documentation, that format is a billion times better in text than video. If I'm somewhat familiar with the topic, know what I'm looking for, the ability to easily skip over introductions, side topics and history and just Ctrl+F for e.g. a piece of code, it can save an order of magnitude of time. I tend to like videos for things I'm wholly unfamiliar with and want to listen to from start to finish, which frankly is pretty limited.