I’ll speed-up (using FF on a DVR) long boring chase sequences. Older films and TV shows (Mission Impossible!) were bad for this - get in the car, start the car, drive, park the car, get out of the car, walk up to the house, walk into the house - FF that stuff.
I’ll also speed-up subtitled films. I Was Curious (Yellow) wasn’t quite so bad at twice the speed, although there were certain sequences that I played back at normal speed.
And yeah, porn is often much better at 2x or 3x the speed (I’ve been told) (by myself).
I am under the impression that most films on DVD in countries with a 25 frames per second TV system simply speed the 24fps film up to 25, with the corresponding increase in audio pitch. (In countries like the USA with 30fps TV, they pretty much just duplicate every fourth movie frame while keeping the original audio.) This feature can be used to get the film back to its normal speed and sound.
I don’t know about shows, but they certainly have been known to do this with TV edits of movies. How do you think they get 90% of movies, with their theatrical running times all over the place, to fit into exactly 2hrs w/commercials?
Some stations will even tell you this at the beginning when they say stuff like EDITED FOR CONTENT with a TIME COMPRESSED or something like that.
KMPlayer is just a front end to MPlayer, a command-line media player. Not only does MPlayer allow you to alter the playback speed, but you can also keep the pitch constant if you want, using the “scaletempo” audio filter. For example,
mplayer -speed 1.25 -af scaletempo my_movie.ogv
tells it to play the movie my_movie.ogv at 125% speed while keeping the pitch constant.
Most likely there’s some way of telling KMPlayer to do this as well. If you’re interested, poke around in the configuration settings and see.
