Increase/Decrease Video Playback Speed In All iOS Apps With VideoPace
A few months ago, we covered a Cydia tweak by the name of FastForward, which lets users control video playback speed in different apps on their iOS device. Not everyone might appreciate a tweak of this kind, but it certainly has its uses on some occasions. You can use it to quickly go through boring videos that just have to be watched, but not very thoroughly. It is, however, far from perfect and has a few glaring shortcomings. For one thing, you cannot slow down videos, as the tweak only has options to increase the playback speed. Also, there is also no option for choosing a universal speed factor that is applied across all apps installed on your iPhone, and each app has to be configured separately. Maybe these were the factors that compelled the popular Cydia developer Ryan Petrich (who most recently created FlipSwitch) to come up with a similar but better alternative to the tweak. VideoPace doesn’t require a lot of configuration, and can be used to both speed up and slow down videos.
VideoPace is a really simple tweak, and comes with an uncomplicated menu in the stock Settings app. To configure it, you have to choose a factor by which to slow down or speed up playback. The video can be slowed down by 50 percent, while the speeding up options go up to 100%. Once a factor has been chosen, just quit the Settings app. VideoPace handles almost all videos played in iOS, regardless of their original source. We tested the tweak in the official YouTube app and it worked as advertised without even needing a respring. If you run into any problems though, just kill the troublesome media app and restart it after choosing the appropriate factor.
On the face of it, the ability to slow down video playback might not seem to be a big deal, but it can help you every once in a while, like when you want to get a good look at that homerun footage you found on YouTube, or to get more time to note down an equation shown in one of your video lectures. This makes VideoPace a decent tweak to have in your collection, specially given the fact that it is available as a free download. VideoPace does not make any visible changes to the apps it affects, although it would have been nice to get a toggle to control the playback speed without having to go to the Settings app repeatedly. The tweak is available in the BigBoss repo of the Cydia store, and works with both iOS 5 and iOS 6.
It’s ghostware, doesn’t even exist.