Add ability to set playback rate for media

[LewisCowles]

Media elements seem to lack a playback rate despite the functionality being provided by all modern browsers and mediaelement.js library

Until recently I've just been downloading media to watch at higher speed.

Hacking at the speed is reasonably easy from a bookmarklet I've made and started using today instead of downloading (loops over all media, this might not be correct for anyone but me).

​https://gist.github.com/Lewiscowles1986/341778bac770fb953fe16512f8858e88

It'd be great if the core functionality could be supported (needs tests and a less naive implementation than my bookmarklet).

I Have searched for plugins for the meantime

I've also got a fork of ​https://github.com/Daronspence/media-playback-speed/blob/master/media-playback-speed.php at ​https://github.com/CODESIGN2/media-playback-speed.

Ideas for further enhancement

• wordpress filter for default buttons added to media controls
• wordpress filter for speed settings (would also make translation trivial)

[afercia]

Discussed during today's accessibility bug-scrub, definitely not our area of expertise so we'd defer the decision to the Media team and remove the accessibility focus for now.

[LewisCowles]

Probably worth noting the plugin is likely the best place to track progress on this.

The code is also used on some other OpenSource projects, despite not needing much maintenance from my side.

Using Alongside another plugin I published for visual shortcodes, it's possible to use Gutenberg with native HTML5 audio & video and now to use with playlists. With per-control & per-page settings.

I'm delighted to know that this has been useful for people using WordPress for things outside of my original goals (to speed up or slow down podcasts); and has been used for music tuition and language tuition.