Update: The playback speed control is comng to the HTML media player and not the media control widget. Thank you Leopeva64 for correcting the error.

Google Chrome has a nifty play media control widget that lets you pause, resume media. You will soon see playback speed control options in this menu.

Playback Speed Button

The media control widget started off as a simple and easy way to pause and resume media content from Chrome’s toolbar. It slowly eveolved into a powerful menu.

The latest iteration of the widget lets you control content from Chromecasts on your network. Google added then added controls like next/previous track and a seek bar.

So, what’s next?

Meet the playback speed button.

A newly added Chrome flag adds a playback speed button to the media control widget. I am yet to see this in action, but here is what the flag says it will do:

Playback Speed Button: Enable the playback speed button on the media controls.

Do you watch YouTube videos and other media content faster than 1x? I use a Chrome extension to change the playback speed for YouTube videos quickly. The extension helped me go through my (very) long list of “Watch later” videos on YouTube.

The ability to control playback speed for videos without an extension is exciting. I will probably buy some icecream for the family to celebrate if I can control playback speed of videos while casting. That’s something that I cannot do now.

What about you? Do you watch videos or podcasts at 1.25 or 1.5? If you do, say hello in the comments section below.

I shall update the article with screenshots as soon as I get this feature working.

Source: Chromium Gerrit and bugs.chromium.org.