Skip Silence: Automatically skip silent parts of video and audio streams
Skip Silence is an open source extension for Chromium-based web browsers such as Google Chrome and for Mozilla's Firefox web browser. The extension's main purpose is to skip silent parts of audio and video streams, but it has more to offer than that.
One of the main ideas behind the extension is to speed up the playing of videos or audio files by skipping parts that are silent. Think about lectures, demonstrations or audiobooks, and the time you could save going through them if the silent parts would be skipped.
Skip Silence works automatically on the majority of media streaming sites on the Internet. It worked on YouTube, Instagram, Ted Talks and many other sites during tests. Media streams are played continuously while the extension is active, but silent parts are played at three times the default playback speed. The extension uses a volume threshold to determine the silent passages of a media stream; this may sometimes result in low voice parts of videos and audios to be speed up by the factor three, even though they are not silent.
Skip Silence includes preferences to adjust the volume threshold and other parameters. A click on the extension icon opens the interface. It features a toggle to enable or disable it on the fly and a display of the current volume and the volume threshold at the top.
You may use the Volume Threshold slider to adjust it and another slider to adjust the Sample Threshold. If the volume is below the selected threshold, the video will be sped up. The Sample Threshold value defines the length of silence that is required before the video is sped up. Increase it to only speed up longer sections of silence in video and audio files.
Skip Silence enables you to change the playback and silence speed. Playback speed is set to the default value of 1, while silent speed is set to 3. You may adjust it, for instance, to increase the playback speed to 1.5 and the silence speed to 2.0.
The extension is set up to collect anonymous analytics by default, but a toggle is provided to disable the sending and opt-out of it entirely.
Several features that are provided are available to supporters only. For a one-time payment of $5, users may unlock all features on all their devices; this includes the ability to mute the silent parts of streams and enable the dynamic threshold feature, which adjusts thresholds automatically for each video.
Closing Words
Students and Internet users who like to listen to lessons, demonstrations or podcasts, may find Skip Silence useful, as it may reduce the time needed to play a video or audio stream from start to finish. Some may find it sufficient to simply speed up the entire video or audio, which most services and media players support by default. Others may like the combination of features of Skip Silence, and give it a shot.
Now You: do you speed up videos or audios sometimes?
Any portable desktop toool for this?
I also recommend looking at https://github.com/WofWca/jumpcutter
This extension does the same thing, but it also knows how to open embedded videos from other sites, unlike Skip Silence https://github.com/vantezzen/skip-silence/issues/71
So I just tested this out on YouTube Music. This works very well to act like a “crossfader” of tracks. Obviously the tracks don’t overlap, but the silence between tracks is gone and that is GREAT.
Thanks for letting us know about this one.
EDIT: This is not available for Firefox at the moment. Evidently Mozilla has difficulty compiling it and until they can do so to test it, they won’t publish? Here is a developer comment on their Github page:
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This is a known issue. Mozilla seems to have changed some of their rules and “reevaluated” their decision to approve the extension because they need to build the extension package themselves.
From their mail:
Details:
We have tried to build your add-on using the provided sources on Ubuntu 18.04.2 using node 16.14.1, npm 8.5.5, but the process aborted with errors.
Their system seems not to be able to compile node-sass, and they won’t use the pre-build zip. I’m currently in the process of updating the instructions to work on a clean Debian installation.
>Evidently Mozilla has difficulty compiling it and until they can do so to test it, they won’t publish?
https://web.archive.org/web/20210912081244/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/skip-silence/
Evidently is only the addon developer cannot make it work. Despite Mozilla using webextensions too and many extra APIs to make it easier for devs to access low level functions. Evidently it was either deleted by the author or Mozilla, as stated on the current version of the now empty addon page.
“the video will be sped up.” or will the video speed up?