This is one reason I find videos for purely informational content are often frustrating. It'd often be so much faster to just read text.

Youtube-dl, then play at your desired speed in mpv, xine, mplayer, or VLC. Keyboard control to skip forward and back. There's mps-youtube for audio-only playback (it also supports video).

Even with this, shitty production -- say, couple of jokers' completely unedited stream-of-blather 2 hour vlog that only got remotely near the point by 20 min in, but failed to hold together through the 30m maark, where I bailed (skipping through, aggressively) -- is intolerable.

Mind: there is very well-produced material. Lectures, audiobooks, documentaries, etc. But like any large complex work, it takes skill, preparation, a goal in mind, and time.

How about a tool that extracts text from youtube-dl downloaded videos? And when you click on a line of text, the tool will read the fragment out loud (useful when the transcription is not clear) using the original audio. And it could show the corresponding video (useful when the presenter is using overhead sheets). You could click a button to make a snapshot of the sheet which is then inserted into the transcript, so the next reader wouldn't have to do this.

Video speed browser extensions make it less bad. I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/ and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...