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Free Plugin by LewisCowles v1.2.2

Media Playback Speed

Add speed controls to audio and video hosted from your WordPress blog.

Media Playback Speed

The facts

Rating
5★ from 9
Active installs
300+
Price
Free
Last updated
5 Jul 2022
Added
Dec 2017
Requires WP
4.0
Tested up to
WP 6.0.14
Requires PHP
7.2
Downloads
6,763

Our analysis

AI-assisted

Media Playback Speed is a WordPress plugin that adds playback speed control buttons to audio, video, and playlist elements created with WordPress shortcodes. It allows you to adjust the playback speed of multiple media files independently using the HTML5 media Element API.

This plugin is suitable for users who want to enhance their media playback options on their WordPress sites. It is particularly useful for content creators who need to provide flexible playback speeds for their audio and video content.

Best for: This plugin suits content creators looking to enhance media playback options on their WordPress sites.

What it does well

  • Adds playback speed buttons to media elements
  • Supports audio, video, and playlists via WordPress shortcodes
  • Allows independent speed adjustment for multiple files
  • Utilises the HTML5 media Element API

Where it falls short

  • No persistence for playback speed settings
  • Functionality not available in browsers that do not support HTML5 media

Verdict

Media Playback Speed offers a straightforward solution for adjusting media playback speeds. It may be limited by browser compatibility and the lack of persistent settings.

From the developer

LewisCowles's own description of Media Playback Speed, lightly tidied.

This short, handy plugin will add playback buttons to your audio, video & playlist elements added via the built-in WordPress shortcodes for media using mediaelement.js.

Each set of buttons is configured for it’s corresponding element on the page, so you can adjust the speed of multiple files independently.

There is currently no persistence implemented in this plugin. It just scratches an itch to be able to broadly adjust media playback speeds using the HTML api.

NOTE: This uses the HTML5 media Element API. Any browser not supporting these or using the Flash Player fallback will miss out on this functionality.

Developers

Two hooks are provided within this plugin.

  • media-playback-speed-generate-controls provides a single argument which is a boolean. If you return this as false, this will stop buttons being added to a media player. This is intended for advanced setups where markup for controls might be placed manually elsewhere on the page such as a sticky footer. So long as controls follow the built-in markup (being within the body tag and have a playback-rate-button class (no default styling, used for enabling DOM access only).

  • ‘media-playback-speed-data’ provides the default array containing arrays as items with rate, title and label entries, which set the playback rate, the title and aria-title for the buttons as well as adjust the button text.

Theme & Front-end

The .playback-rate-button.mejs-active and/or .playback-rate-button.active-playback-rate CSS-selectors allow you to style the active speed (per-player).

Initially mejs-active class was added in order to create media-playback-js compatible / familiar class names.

Now that Gutenberg does not add these, it makes sense to for-now add two sets of classes.

The .playback-rate-button.mejs-active selector will be deprecated in version 2.

Troubleshooting

This works with the traditional audio, video and playlist shortcodes so long as WordPress uses the JavaScript player.

With the latest 1.1.1 release this also works for HTML5 audio and video too, however you will need to implement your own controls which have the playback-rate-button class and follow the patterns of this.

HTML5 raw controls do not have a playlist the author is aware of, and they use global state, so playback rate is per-page.

Read the full description on the official page →

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