Playback Speeds for Flare
If there is one thing I love, it is user selectable playback speeds.
You genuinely cannot tell 1.5x after a while, and with headphones I can comfortably push things as high as 4x and still comprehend what is being said. Once you get used to it, going back to 1x feels painfully slow.
So when I discovered that Flare, the gold standard for Mastodon and multi platform social clients, was missing proper video playback speed controls, I had to do something about it.
What better test for the newly minted and freshly glazed Fable 5.1 model?
I forked Flare and added user selectable video playback speeds on Android, with speeds ranging from 1x all the way up to 4x in 0.1x increments. I also added a setting to choose your default playback speed, so you do not have to change it every time you open a video.
While I was in there, I added the ability to open the currently selected image, video, GIF or audio in an external app directly from the media viewer.
The result is a small but very useful upgrade to an already excellent open source client.
Flare itself is pretty impressive. It brings Mastodon, Misskey, Bluesky, X, Pixiv, Fanbox, Nostr and RSS together into one unified timeline, with cross posting, lists, feeds, DMs and even AI features. It is built with Kotlin Multiplatform too, so a lot of the underlying functionality is shared across platforms.
And now, at least on Android, you can watch your videos at whatever speed your brain can handle.
Check out the Flare fork on GitHub
Sometimes you just need your social media client to let you watch a 60 second video in 15 seconds.