I’d love to see this added to the many HTML media players out there because it’s so useful to be able to slow down complex educational explanations or speec

I’d love to see this added to the many HTML media players out there because it’s so useful to be able to slow down complex educational explanations or speech where the listener is a non-native speaker. Similarly, it’s helpful to speed up media when you’re in a rush or simply bored. I work in a research lab studying & developing software for teaching languages, and this is one of the major reasons we decided to focus on HTML5 playback for annotated videos[1], which we've currently got piloted in several college-level French and German classes. When watching / listening to lecture material in a language they are familiar with, students tend to fast-forward and consume the material between 1.5 and 2x faster than real-time speed; meanwhile, when watching difficult sections of dialog, they'll slow it down and listen over and over[2] to make sure they hear it right. Unfortunately, not all the resources we use are available in HTML5-compatible form (i.e., we don't have access to a file, we're just embedding a YouTube video or something), and so we provide a wrapper around a bunch of different services' embeddable players to make them all look the same to the student, but most of them don't support changing playback rate, and it's a sufficiently popular feature that we get bug reports saying it broke whenever it has to be disabled because of the underlying service not providing a suitable API. [1] Real-world (i.e., not made specifically for pedagogical use) media featuring real natural language usage that's been marked up with captions, glosses, commentary, etc., to make it accessible to lower-level language learners. There are several interesting start-ups in this space right now, like MovieMouth, which produces auxiliary content for Disney films to teach English to Spanish speakers (you must provide the actual Disney film yourself). [2] Which brings up another killer feature of HTML5 media: arbitrary seeking. Makes it really easy to implement auto-repeat, which is great both for students wanting to listen to a few seconds over and over, and for transcribers who need to produce the annotations we use. It is so freaking annoying when Brightcove or YouTube or whatever other player will jump around whole seconds before or after where the users tells them to seek, or just refuse to seek at all sometimes. Another major source of bug reports from students who get used to HTML5 just working.