Slowing down video to half-speed becomes hot suddenly in the YouTube community. It provides a much closer look at the action, for example, a water-drop falling down, a bullet passing through a body and the like. But how can we achieve the effect? Let’s see these tricks.

Step 1: Option 1: YouTube

YouTube designed this feature for teaching-type videos on its website. There are broad choices of speed for users to play a video. You can slow down video by picking a playback speed of 0.25x, 0.5x, or speed up the video by 1.25x, 1.5x and 2x. The speed option is hidden in Settings in its toolbar. After you click the Setting button, you’ll notice the Speed in the menu that opens up. Make sure you are using YouTube’s HTML5 video player. If you have no idea about it, go to this link (https://www.youtube.com/html5) to join the HTML5 trial link. If you’ve already joined it, the page will show the message “The HTML5 player is currently used when possible”.

Step 2: Option 2: VLC Media Player

VLC can slow down any videos that you’ve loaded into the player interface. Import video at first by clicking Media > Open File…, Pause the video, and drop down Playback > Speed then you’ll find 5 options there: Faster – speed up the video playback by 0.4x, Faster (fine) – increase the video speed by 0.1x, Normal – set the speed to 1.0x, Slower (fine) – Reduce the speed of the video by 0.1x, Slower – Reduce the video by 0.4x. Speed up the video gradually until you reach the level that you are comfortable with.

Step 3: Option 3: Free App

The free app “Free Online Video Converter” also provides settings for slowing down or speeding up video. Press Browse to import video into the web, tick a format for the output file, in the Advanced Settings, check Slow > 2.0x or 4.0x to slow down the speed for playing your video, finally press Convert to save the file to your computer or hard drive. My suggestion for advising this app to slow down video is it can save the file you’ve speeded up or slowed down, which can never be done with Option 1 and Option 2. But the frustrating thing is it not available on Chrome; other browsers are okay with it.