Double-tap the right side of a playing video to jump forward ten seconds, the left side to go back. Hold instead of tapping and it keeps going. There is a speed control too, and it works on anything with sound in it.
These are small gestures, and they change what long media is worth. A forty-minute recording you can move around in is a resource; the same file without them is something you never open.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Skip and rewind without aiming at a progress bar.
- check_circle Change playback speed on video, voice and round messages.
- check_circle Drive the player from a keyboard on a computer.
- check_circle Understand why seeking is sometimes slow, and fix it.
Left half back, right half forward. The gesture is the same one video apps have trained everybody to expect.
speed Aiming is the problem these solve
Dragging a progress bar on a phone is imprecise: the bar is a few hundred pixels wide and the video is an hour long, so a millimetre is a minute. Double-tapping removes the aiming entirely. You are not choosing a position, you are asking for a fixed step, and a fixed step can be repeated until you are where you want to be.
Holding gives you the other half: continuous movement for when ten seconds at a time is too slow. Between the two, the progress bar becomes something you rarely touch.
Speed is the same idea applied to the whole thing. Somebody speaking slowly at one and a half times is still perfectly clear, and the pitch is corrected so they do not sound comical. It applies to voice messages and round video messages as well, which is where most people meet it first.
Four kinds of thing to play
Each wants a different combination of the same three controls.
headphones A talk, a lesson, a recorded session
mic Somebody sent four minutes of talking
search You know roughly where it is
wifi Seeking is not instant
Three controls, all on the same screen: step, hold, speed. They are the difference between watching and using.
settings The gestures
- Tap a video to open it fullscreen The gestures work in the player.
- Double-tap right to skip forward And left to go back, ten seconds each time.
- Press and hold to keep moving Release where you want to be.
- Use the speed control for anything long It is in the player's controls, and on voice messages it is on the bubble.
- On desktop, use the arrow keys and space Precise stepping without a mouse.
- Check your auto-download settings They decide whether playback starts instantly or waits.
This page is controlling playback. The curriculum step is what decides whether there is anything to play yet: per-network download rules, size thresholds, roaming, and why the same video opens instantly at home and stalls on a train.
At a glance
- 1Double-tap to skip
Tap the sides of a video to jump back or forward.
- 2Speed
Change speed for video, voice and round messages.
- 3Keyboard on desktop
Use arrow keys to seek and space to pause.
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