INTERACT FORUM
More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 26 for Windows => Topic started by: audunth on June 20, 2020, 04:05:08 am
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Hi,
As I'm binge watching another TV show, I thought of a feature which would be useful. Most TV shows have some sort of recap/intro/title song at the beginning, after which the screen goes black for a second or two. So pressing a key to skip to the next point in the video where the screen goes black for x milliseconds would be a great feature, instead of having to manually skip ahead x number of times until you skip too far and have to skip back again. Sometimes you'd have to press twice if the screen goes black between recap and title song for example, but that's okay. Still much easier than pressing right arrow maybe 10-20 times (depending on how many seconds you've set the skip to, of course).
This would be great when watching several episodes in a row and you don't wanna watch the 2-3-4 minute long intro every time.
And yes, I do know you can choose how many seconds you skip with the arrow keys, and for shows where the intro is exactly the same length every episode, it's pretty easy to hit exactly the point where the episode starts. But for most shows (that I've seen, anyway), that's not the case, as recaps/intros tend to be of varying length.
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I think I know how to help you :)
In tags are fields Bookmark and Use bookmark. Bookmarking (https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Bookmarking)
All you should do:
- Select all the files need to skip beginning
- In tag field Bookmark set 1000*X seconds to skip (30000 for 30 sec etc)
- Use bookmark set to yes (if play from bookmark is disabled in options)
- Profit
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As I stated in my post, this feature request is for all the shows (by far the most shows I've watched) that does NOT have the same length intro in every episode. So that wouldn't work.
And even shows where the intro is exactly the same every episode (very few in my experience), it would be much easier just to hit a key than spend time counting seconds and tagging. I think even remembering how many times I have to press right arrow is easier.
Should be a pretty easy feature to add, even my old cassette player from the 1980's had a feature where it could fast forward and automatically stop at the pause before the next song :D
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I haven't noticed many shows that reliably fade to black after the intro. I just use the skip keys myself.
If the duration of the intro was consistent you could just add a start time to the [Playback Range] field. See https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Playback_Range
If the intro duration was approximately the same, the above may be enough as well.
Otherwise, there are Particles. But they need to be set up in advance, so not much of an improvement. https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Particles
The only automated way to get this now would be to use the ComSkip utility to create an *.edl file that skips the first part of the show. For MC to do what you want, I suspect the file would have to be analysed first anyway and couldn't skip to black in real time by scanning the file, so may as well use ComSkip. See https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,96783.0.html to get started, and search around here. That still may be more work than is worth it.
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Doing something like this "live" during playback is really not quite feasible, unfortunately. Analyzing audio and finding silence is trivial, analyzing video and finding a black frame may sound easy, but during playback its not always. There are situations where you can't even get to the image properly at all (ie. hardware decoding), and processing entire video frames can be quite costly on performance. Nevermind edge cases like avoiding false positives.
Finding the right spots before playback and being able to jump there is a much better option. Many formats support something as simple as chapters, so you can setup a chapter point right after the recap or intro, and one remote press would get you there.
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Well, setting it up in advance defies the whole purpose of saving time...maybe an option for a sitcom or something you can watch over and over again (but they usually have short intros with no recap anyway), but when it's a show with 100 episodes you wanna watch once and every one has a recap (for those who don't know a recap is when they play some scenes of what happened earlier on the show and, since new stuff happens every episode, it is never the same length, it is very common that it varies 10-20 seconds between episodes), a skip to black feature would be very useful. No other solution is easier than just hitting right arrow until you maybe go to far and then hit left arrow once or twice, like I do now.
Even shows with just a title song/intro with equal length in every episode (as I said, very few of the types of shows I watch) I'll rather just remember how many times I have to press right arrow to skip the intro than spend half an hour setting up some batch operation.
I get that it can be hard, since MC doesn't know every frame that comes ahead (the cassette player comparison was mostly a joke), I just thought I would suggest it, in case you developers had an ace up your sleeves ;) If not, no worries, the jump ahead function works pretty well, too :)
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I'm finding quite a few of the series I watch include not just a "Previously" before the intro, but also new content. Sometimes it is just the "Previously" with a few more short video sections that clarify the storyline. Sometimes it quite changes the storyline. Sometimes it is completely new material and not a "Previously" at all.
Therefore using the skip keys makes the most sense.
However, if I was binge watching a series that always had a fixed into at the very beginning I would just set the [Playback Range] field for all episodes. That would take me about 30 seconds, once I knew how long the intro was.
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It's not trivial at all to implement this as it basically would need to decode each frame anyway to know when it's black - also, it's not guaranteed that there is always a black frame. A black frame would occur at [KeyFrame]-1, but to know which one it would need to decode everything starting from the previous keyframe anyway. I suppose it could be implemented as a kind of fast-forward, you would still see all the frames.
There's a possible automated solution though - using an external video processor with some script to pre-process each file, detect the black frame and then add a chapter marker on that position. This would work on MKV or other containers supporting chapters, and can probably be done with ffmpeg+scripts, but... good luck on that ;D Try google, probably someone already did it.
PS: one google search later: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/364795-Automatic-chapter-creation
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One thing I remembered - I use MPC-HC as an external player and it has keys for next/prev keyframe. Keyframes come usually every 5 to 10 seconds, and there's always an extra one when the scene changes completely. So to skip an intro you only need to press the skip key a few times.
I don't know if the internal MC player has this "next keyframe" key.