Agreed. Even years ago when I only knew of Sal's videos on youtube, I would often download them and play them back at 200% to save on time. This would be really appreciated.

I found the programming section (My planned Degree major) discouraging for not being able to view its lessons at x2 speed. Though I will be pushing myself to continue learning programming through Khan, my initial thought was "well, back to just math and miscellaneous topics, I guess."

Yes, many videos describe things I already know but have some things that could help me...a 2x/3x/4x would help keep me focused, especially with my ADHD.

For the sake of time I often watch in 1.5/2. Having this feature would prevent me from having to carry my computer around with me so often.

weirdly I'm having the opposite problem, my video seems to be stuck in 2x speed and I would like it to not be

I agree. Being able to set a default speed to all videos would be brilliant!

Thanks :)

if you're are using chrome you can use the chrome plugin in called video speed controller. 

link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=en

While it still seems like there are no settings for this (almost three years later...), you can adjust the speed with '>' and '<', turn captions on and off with 'c', and make caption text larger or smaller with '+' and '-' while the video is in focus (ie, you've clicked on it or it's in full screen).

+1 for the idea, but I'd want KA to rembmer my last speed instead of having to set up the default.

I came up with a work-around. It's far from perfect but it allows you to set a default playback speed other than 1x.

Like others, I was also frustrated because the videos automatically start with closed captions on so I went searching for a solution. A member named Arec Gerai created a Chrome browser extension to disable the closed captions by default:

https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/213615368-How-to-turn-off-captions-subtitles-by-default-

That extension can be downloaded here:

https://openuserjs.org/scripts/rixils/khanacademy-disable-sub/source

I needed both features so I adapted the code.

To change the default speed, I added the following lines to the end of the disableVideoPlayerSubtitles() function, just before the closing brace }

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Set default player speed
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////

let speed = 1.5; // <-- SET THIS TO 1.5 or 2

let attempts = 0;
let myInterval = setInterval(function() {
    if (typeof playerIframe !== 'undefined') {
        playerIframe.contentWindow.postMessage(
            JSON.stringify({event: 'command', func: 'setPlaybackRate', args: [speed, true]})
        , '*');
    }

    if (++attempts >= 5) {
        clearInterval(myInterval);
    }
}, 1000);
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////

So basically when the video player loads this code will attempt to change the player speed to the desired amount. It will attempt this once every second for five seconds.

It's an extremely crude solution but it works in my browser. You can still change the speed back to 1 or 2 while the video is playing, but the extension will ensure the player always starts at 1.5x or whatever you put in the code above. The only way to stop this new default speed setting is to disable the extension. This shouldn't affect videos on other sites, though.

To install the extension, just download the raw source code from the link above, add my changes, and then save it to a .js file such as "khanacademy-disable-sub.js". Next, open the Extensions tab in Chrome (in my version it's under Window->Extensions). Finally, drag the .js file you created onto the Extensions tab.

Hope that helps. If anyone has a better solution, please share it here. Thanks

To elaborate on Ethan's shortcut advice above, you can use Shift+< to decrease playback speed and Shift+> to increase playback speed (at least on Windows; Macs could have different shortcuts).

This is so much more convenient than clicking through the YouTube embedded player's settings menu for every video.

That said, persisting a viewer's preferred speed setting and applying it to every video by default would be ideal. AFAIK the YouTube API allows doing this out of the box.

In addition, it would be great to add a default for closed captioning on/off because it gets in the way and I have to disable it for every single video I watch before I go on to set the speed.

Putting suggestions from others together, this userscript has options to set the speed as well as disable subtitles: https://github.com/tziporaziegler/khanacademy-video-player