Mastering Variable Speed Video Streaming with the Latest Plex Feature Update

Plex is a popular way to host your own media library for easy streaming and sharing, but the video player isn’t perfect. There’s now a new feature rolling out: video playback speed controls.

YouTube and a few other video platforms have a setting to change the video playback speed, allowing you to watch content slower or faster than it was originally intended. That’s mostly helpful for interviews, podcasts, or other media where you might want to hear people talking faster, but it can be useful in other cases too. Plex has now added it to the video player on most platforms.

Plex

Plex said in a new support article, “Playback Speed Controls allow for speeding up or slowing down playback in some of our player/client apps. The feature is not available on all platforms, as some of them cannot support the functionality or have too many limitations to be considered useful for playback.”

The full list of supported platforms is below. Plex says it’s not available on some devices because they “cannot support the functionality or have too many limitations to be considered useful for playback.”

Supported Plex Apps

• Amazon Fire TV (v10.13.0 and newer)
• Android mobile (v10.13.0 and newer)
• Android TV (v10.13.0 and newer)
• Apple TV (v8.34 and newer)
• iOS (v8.34 and newer)
• Linux (desktop) (v1.91 and newer)
• macOS (desktop) (v1.91 and newer)
• Plex HTPC (v1.59.0 and newer)
• Plex Web App (v4.128.1 and newer)
• Smart TV (available only on VIDAA and only for Direct Play) (v5.80 and newer)
• Windows (desktop) (v1.91 and newer)
• Xbox (v5.80 and newer)

You can change the playback speed to 0.5x, 0.75x, normal speed, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, and 2x. However, there are some catches. You need an active Plex Pass subscription, it’s not available in Watch Together sessions, and the playback speed cannot be adjusted for live TV.

The announcement also mentioned that playback speed will remain constant in a play queue. For example, if you add several TV episodes to your watch queue and change the playback speed, the next episodes will continue using that playback speed. No need to constantly change the playback speed setting.

Source: Plex Forums , Plex Support

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