A plex employee commented on my post on the Plex subreddit suggesting I post details of my issue here.
So far I’ve had 2 episodes on two different shows where it made the same mistake, which is that it flagged part of the regular episode as credits when it shouldn’t have.
The first one is kind of reasonable. It was South Park, Season 2, Ep. 4, titled Chickenlover. At the 19:50 mark, Officer Barbrady gives the ‘camera’ a thumbs up and just freezes like that while some 70’s style cop-show music plays (it sounds like the Charlie’s Angels theme). And when the music starts, a single “Executive Producer” credit appears on a screen for a moment as a joke. I assume the music and the producer credit is what caused the false positive. But after about 20 seconds of that, the rest of the episode continued.
The second case, I’m not really sure what the server was thinking. Oddly enough, it was a different show but also Season 2, Ep. 4. This time, Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode titled The Outrageous Okona. At 41:30, with about 4 minutes left to the episode, Data is on stage acting like a stand-up comic as he tries to learn about comedy. He’s telling bad jokes, the holodeck audience is laughing, there’s no music, and the only text on screen is a fancy sign behind him on stage. So I have no idea what triggered it to think that was part of the credits. There’s other sections before and after the false credit markers, that also feature him on stage with a laughing audience which weren’t flagged as part of the credits. So yeah, no clue.
I have to say, I’m a little worried this feature is going to have a really high rate of false positives. Since detecting credits was added, this problem has happened twice so far, in less than a day, across the first two shows analyzed, after watching only a few episodes of each show.
Fortunately we haven’t yet reached full self awareness and the algorithm used for detecting the credits is not perfect and won’t ever be (it’s around 93% accurate with our testing data set).
As we find common patterns where we can tweak the algorithm we will do so to improve the accuracy. We’re also discussing ways internally to give server admins some additional tools to help fix things that aren’t quite right, but nothing concrete we can share currently.
Thank you for the examples and the additional detail you provided, it does help us knowing what things to look at. If you have more feel free to add them here.
We have added some options to disable detection at the movie and show level, so if there are items that just don’t work well with the algorithm currently, go ahead and disable it there.
I have an issue with some anime shows. Re:Zero season 1 episode 3 is a good example. The credits start playing over a scene in the show but there is still dialog happening. The credits are technically being detected so I’m not sure what the solution to this is or if there is one. The skip credits button shows up around the 21:20 mark and skips to the 22:51 mark to bring you to the after credits scene. This actually happens a few times in this show.
Yeah I also find it to be pretty inconsistent with anime. It’s understandable though as I find the credit scenes with most anime rarely ever have pure black backgrounds and the text for the credit also a lot of times fade in and out with gaps in between rather than have a constant stream of text. I’m not sure if it would be possible but maybe you can add to the algorithm the ability to detect common ending songs in a show similar to how the skip intro does it but for credits.
Seems like maybe animation is particularly problematic. Most shows so far, it’s right probably 90% of the time. But animated shows like South Park, Plex seems to get the credit markers wrong a lot. Easily more than half the episodes are wrong. Sometimes the credit marker comes way too early, sometimes much too late. Sometimes it doesn’t find any credits, or the only credit markers it adds are for a section before the actual credits start.
Just to chime in with another example, Married with Children - S06E23 - The Gas Station Show, has a scene near the end with a bunch of different signs that are being detected as credits. It added three credits markers for this episode, and only the last one covers the actual credits (thumbnails are start and end timestamp thumbnails):
It interacts with your database in a completely unsupported way, so definitely be aware of the risks if you try it out. The safest option would be to use it in a “read-only” way by copying your Plex database and pointing the editor to that.
Anyone mind if I drop in here to post a “credit mistake”? I can make my own post if we prefer, but the forum here’d get pretty full of small posts if we all started making a hundred separate posts.
For the most part, I’ve been accepting of the credit markers. They seem to get confused a bit around loads of text (or lack of text). I know it’s not perfect, but I was watching a show and suddenly got a strange “credit” marker on one episode where even this failed logic I couldn’t explain:
Primal (2019), S02E03. about 1 minute away from the real credits, a “skip credits” marker appears. There is zero text during this point, and the marker is only for about 5 seconds of people:
I have seen a lot of this with my old tv shows. Less with the new ones. Could this be a cloud issue, that markers from the cloud not matching with local media @drzoidberg33 ? How exactly does the cloud match local media? I was meant to understand it was at the hash level that is for the same file type matching.
I’d like to know as well. I hope Plex adds a tag to the markers in the XML to indicate where the source of the credit came from. For now, after reading about a possible “rogue” cloud credit marker from an older version of the credit marker logic, I have decided to disable cloud markers and use local only.
Unless disabling cloud markers deletes all cloud markers, I doubt it will fix this. I tried to do a manual analyze on the episode after I disabled cloud but my server didn’t do anything new.
Cloud markers are supposed to be hash-based. I can’t imagine the infrastructure Plex has to have to record the unique hash for thousands of shows and movies PER account across all of Plex.
Please allow us to disable “Skip Credits” on each individual Player!
The Credits Detection is making mistakes in almost every one of my shows and movies. I never want the video to shrink/minimize, and now it often does it before the credits have even started!
I can’t disable this on the server because I don’t control this server. This needs to be a playback option.
Those statements don’t contradict each other. It sounds like the problem would be that someone else used a different version of the algorithm on the exact same file, and the cloud database doesn’t take that into account when serving the markers when there’s a newer version of the detection available.
