Hello,
i was looking and did not find how to select in my library all black and white movies. Hard to believe nobody has this implemented/requested so far. Please have such a library sort/filter option. I honestly think it should be where you can filter for decades/years,directors…
AFAIK, it is technically impossible to distinguish b/w from color videos.
Unless there is a flag dedicated to this in the embedded meta data, I don’t see a sensible way to build this.
geez! I can’t believe this is something which all the meta data provider fail to document. I see the point, but there is a need to have the data - or not? Can the metadata of each movie be extended to have the b/w flag optionally? I would like it to come from the movie database but if i need to maintain it locally, i can also do that.
I guess there would be hundreds of users who also might like the feature and probably haven’t even thought about it yet. 
Until there might be such a source and its metadata available within Plex…
Have you considered using a Sharing Label to tag those movies for your purpose as a workaround?
Then you can assign them to a smart collection according to their color mode (e.g. Color, Black and White or even Colored [versions of originally black and white movies]). It’s not perfect (as it’ll require manually assigning that label) – but it should do the trick and can be filtered as needed.
As part of Plex’s process of detecting opening and end credits, can it also ascertain an item’s main colour profile and add this as metadata to the media please?
This would help to identify items that need upgrading (B&W media doesn’t need as high a bitrate as colour) as well as help to choose a film to watch (by filtering out B&W ones, for instance).
The color profile is already part of the Plex media info.
Maybe you should re-phrase the request and rather mention the ability to filter your library according to profile.
Side note: it is extremely unusual to have a black/white color profile assigned to a b/w video. I have never seen such a file “in the wild”.
I can’t see any reference to ‘color profile’ on that page, or in my media’s XML files unfortunately.
There is a ‘color space’ attribute, but that isn’t relevant to this requirement. Without the relevant metadata, being able to filter out or to ‘Black & White’ media will be a tricky proposition - hence the suggestion to generate it.
Perhaps I’m missing something obvious @OttoKerner?
“Black and White” video isn’t black and white in encoding is what he is saying. The video is still 4:x:x color even if all the values on screen are monochrome. The video isn’t true greyscale anyway. It usually has a color cast of some sort (either blue or brown).
You could easily just add a “black and white” label to videos that aren’t full color, and then make a library view of just that label.
Thanks @nx6! I was wondering if this might be automated however, as I don’t have the time to go through tens of thousands of videos, tagging each one individually - hence the feature request.
If Plex can detect opening and closing credits, surely it can also detect monochrome vs colour while it’s at it?
Alternatively IMDb has a ‘color info’ value, the first one of which (where there are multiple) could be pulled.
While I’m not intimately familiar with how PMS detects ending credits (@drzoidberg33 could explain that better), I think it has more to do with the sudden drop in average bitrate for the video (due to static images or black screen) compared to the rest of the program. Also I suspect there may be some on-screen recognition for text maybe (?). When I watch episodes of certain shows that have text near the end (like signs or shots of printed pages) I see Plex interpret it as the start of the credits even when the video is still running.
To detect TV show intros, Plex analyzes the audio track, not the video.
Credit detection analyzes the video. IIRC, Plex looks for large amounts of text on-screen or the video going black. Unsure if audio analysis is also used.
There are multiple ways to programmatically detect whether a frame is in colour or monochrome:
Given Plex’s movie credit detection system already performs frame‑level visual analysis adding a chroma‑based classifier, and tagging the films as colour or black& white accordingly, ought to be a trivial addition to the codebase.
Any idea why voting on this feature request has been closed, btw?
It has not been closed.
