The latest versions of VideoLan Client have a great feature that makes it easy to watch videos at a faster-than-usual speed. They used a spectral pitch-shifting algorithm as well so the resulting audio doesn't remind you of a bunch of demented chipmunks.
This is fantastic for watching conference presentations and other mediocre-quality technical videos at high speed. Speakers with too many ums and ah's are much more tolerable at 2x normal speed.
I tried it with some TV shows I have lying on disk, and low and behold, it works great for these too. Get through a 41-minute (hour-long) show in just 20 minutes! And yes, you can still understand all the dialogue.
(This seems to work best with older shows; newer television tends to have more interesting content per second.)
The only side-effect is that after doing this for too long, videos running at normal speed will start to feel like they're in slow motion. Spooky!
