Dawson's creek at twice the speed, thanks to MythTV

published Jan 05, 2006, last modified Jun 26, 2013

For those of you who probably don't know yet, I don't watch live TV anymore. I just record TV shows on my computer, which then removes commercial breaks and lets me watch them at any time I choose. The marvelous piece of software I'm using for that purpose is MythTV: a personal video recorder which captures the TV shows, compresses them, and lets me program shows to record like a VCR.

Well, I just found out that MythTV is even more useful - beyond my wildest dreams. How? Simple, I always record Dawson's creek reruns and watch them in the afternoon, when I have some leisure time. But sometimes that leisure time won't be long enough to watch an entire episode...

...and that's where MythTV's playback speed function comes to the rescue. I've been watching the last week's Dawson's creek reruns at 1.3X the original speed. No chipmunk voices, no jerkiness in the video, just plain Dawson's creek, but way more interesting! After 1 minute of watching TV like that, the pace of the show feels completely normal again. Plus, no commercial breaks, so I get to watch every episode in about 25-30 minutes, and follow the story without interruptions.

The only thing I regret is, at that speed, the ballads from Dawson's creek sound like country music and acoustic punk.