I have very few general questions about chapters. I have an idea in my head and just poking around to see how feasible it would be.
does plex support chapter generation natively like is used to? IE pulling info from the depreciated/abandoned chaptersDb.org website
How many people are interested in having chapters being created with their content?
I ask because I create my own chapters with titles for all my content in my plex and I love having that bit jump instead of just scrolling through the timeline to get where I left off.
Depending on how much traction, up votes, wanting, blah blah blah, I might find the time to get this going again for plex users.
Am I this alone that having chapters to skip to instantly instead of doom scrolling till I get to what I want? (And yes, all those time stamps for the chapters have been pulled directly from the disc. I did not arbitrarily make them up.)
I’ll leave this up for a couple of more days. But if nobody cares to answer, oh well. No skin off my back. Just wanted to give more options to plex users.
What exactly are you proposing here? I like chapters, and would rather have them in my files than not, but I guess I don’t know how trustworthy an automated solution is (and there is no way in hell I am going to manually go back and add chapters to my massive collection).
It seems like you might posting to ask if anyone would be interested in a -ARR-like system that pulls in chapter data into existing libraries, which would be cool.
Or are you asking to make a plug-in for existing Plex that would dynamically pull chapter info from chaptersdb without touching our original files?
well, first I ask if plex still even pulls chapters. Nobody responded. I don’t know because I make my own right now and I know that in the past plex did pull from chaptersdb.
Next, I asked how many people are still interested in chapters and you are the only one that responded. So far, I got 1.
I am asking to gauge interest on how many people want this feature to work and what plex currently supports for chapters besides manually making them.
So, I am not sure what there is not to understand from my question of “how many people are interested in having chapters with their content.” seems like it’s a straightforward question and with 45 views, I was expecting at least a 30% response rate for something that easy.
I have an idea on how to do this. But my time is scarce, so I don’t want to work on something that would be a waste of my time. Plus, I don’t want to give away, at this moment, what I have in store.
But you posed for me an interesting question. Why don’t you trust automated solutions? plex is pretty automated on how it pulls the meta data to populate information for all your media. Also, you make an excellent point that I have already thought of. Many plex users have a monstrous library. I know of a few that have over 1500 movies in their library. Going back to manually add chapters would be a very hard “go, no go” answer for them.
That is what I was also thinking but I wanted to be sure. I hoped that someone from plex would give a straight answer if it does. But, as usual, I might have to test that out myself to see if it is true. If it does, the selection now is limited and has no data to pull for any of the newer movies. I understand that it that it is now just an archive, so it is read only. the original chaptersdb.org website no longer exists. Also, the software chaptergrabber no longer works either.
and correct again, I also did not find a feature suggestion on it and also thought the same but wanted to reach out anyway to gauge interest. Seems so far with 3 days of my post nobody wanting to respond even with a basic “I would love that” or “chapters sucks” is enough of a response as well.
I personally love chapters in all my content. I even have them for my TV shows. plex would seem to empty to me if I didn’t have my chapters to go with my content.
As far as I knew, Plex doesn’t pull chapter data from anywhere at all! (aside from file internal chapters, of course). If it does, I will be surprised. Though, the interface for when you do have chapters is pretty hard to stumble across. I mean, I have chapters in some files, but I rarely even notice if they exist.
About an automated solution, well, the problem I see is is that video files are rarely alike. With potentially dozens of different editions of movies, it’d be near impossible to determine which version of a movie I got, and a few seconds of movie missing can throw off all chapters if it’s for a different version. Since I have no idea which version I have for any particular movie, I doubt I’d get accurate chapters from an online database.
As for why not many responses to “How many people want chapters with their content”, well, the question to me was fairly vague. It almost sounded like you were just asking how many people would be interested in you submitting a “feature request” to have the devs automate chapters (again?), which I felt wasn’t going to go anywhere.
I don’t usually want to chime in when it’s the question equivalent of someone saying “hey, aren’t hookers and blow great?” So I asked for some clarification.
Again, I like chapters, but I think the mood in the forums right now is “Plex can’t do anything right, they are even REMOVING features and charging us for free things.” The thought that they’d drop everything (metaphorically) and implement chapters is pretty funny.
All fair points. I am a pretty literally kind of guy. If I was planning to do a submission for a feature requestion, I would have said it in my first post. (But I don’t see plex taking any feature requests from their user base seriously at the moment so it is wastefull to thing they will listen). The question was meant to be vague as if someone is conducting a survey if something is even wanted in mass. If it was a yes by many, more details would have been revealed.
Kind of like “how many people want a green theme for plex that makes is look like embay.” Simple and straight to the point.
For sure devs, at the moment or even in the future, will not invest the time to bring back chapters. If they did, they would have even after chaptersdb stop functioning. That is why, I wanted to take that role on myself.
As for the automation part, I am fairly certain I have got that one covered. There are a few ways you can identify different editions of movies because even video has a specific structure to it. at 24p movie will have a different structure than a 29.97 type of movie. These will also be different between the same movie that has different lengths. You can also identify a movie from extrapolating frames from it and then add a fingerprint to it and get a result. Kind of like (and I use that very loosely) one would use shazam to identify a song. Of course there are other challenges for putting the correct chapters with a movie besides just its length.
I agree with you at the moment of the mood of plex. It is pretty rocky overall.
Thank you for the reply. This answers my very first question. This was kind of in my mind as I vaguely remember a time where plex pulled chapters and then stopped pulling. Which at that time I started my make my own. I was just looking for confirmation and this was exactly what I was looking for.
Fingerprinting might be pretty hard to do. It is quite common for people to process their movies into a smaller size. Even two people ripping the exact same movie using the same program with the same settings may result in slightly different bits in any particular point due to the processor they used to compress it.
A more reliable option would be length. Movies ripped from online sources or Discs are going to be the same length for any particular version, due to standard frames-per-second.
Except when they are sourced from different disc types. Think PAL DVD vs. NTSC DVD (25 fps vs. 29.97 fps)
Or simply recorded off OTA, (probably with different ad breaks removed in different ways).
Or are released for different local markets, which either require the cutting of some scenes or simply stick other/additional pre-rolls of the local distributor at the beginning.
As a results, now the playing time is different. And the chapter markers which were made for a different version won’t fit.
Pretty much nailed it. The largest unknown is how the content was extracted for each user and then finding where to appropriately place the markets.
OTA content generally has black insertion into it. Can vary from station to station. Some stations do 3 seconds other can do as much as 5 seconds. It just depends on how their automation is structured. Some will insert both at the beginning of the content and others will do both beginning and end.
For now, that is why I was kind of thinking about doing a fingerprint or even multiple fingerprints. If I invest more time into this, that may change. OTA content does have unique characteristics that can be identified as “OTA Type of Content”. But for now, I think I-frames with a fingerprint might do the trick.
