How can I tell what shows "Skip Intro" works with?

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So I recently purchased a lifetime plex pass, the main feature I was after being Skip Intro.

I read the Skip Intro help article and enabled all the settings as it said to. I even tried to use the manual “analyze” option then waited a few hours before trying a show.

I’ve only managed to get “Skip Intro” to work for ONE show, and that show just happens to be the one they showcase in the article (Brooklyn Nine-Nine). When I try to “analyze” a show, nothing (that I can see, at least) happens. When I used it on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, it showed up in my “Activity” section on plex and showed how long it would take for it to finish.

Is there some sort of way I can tell what show is/isn’t eligible for Skip Intro, or when I run the “analyze” option on a show is there a way to know it’s finished?

Edit:

In case someone stumbles upon this topic, I have found that you can only “Analyze” one season at a time. If you try to use the “Analyze” option on an entire show, it won’t actually do anything. But click into the show, click the 3 dots on one of the season images, then click “Analyze” and it’ll start the process in the “Activity” section of your plex so you can monitor. Only downside is you have to do this season-by-season for every show :frowning: (or wait for plex to slowly read your whole library)

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If the Intro analysis has never been activated before, it can take a long time before you can actually use it.
(days, or even weeks – depending on the size of your media collection and the CPU speed of your server and the speed of the storage connection)

The server has to read all the video files, extract the audio, then compare all the audio streams of one season and try to find a portion where the audio is identical (which is considered the Intro).
So if you have a series where there are different voiceovers in each episode over the intro music, Plex won’t detect the intro as such.

You better make sure to have plenty of free space on your Windows system drive. The intro analysis is using the general /temp folder to store the extracted audio streams. (i.e. not your plex data folder, which might have been moved to a different location)

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I am fine with it taking time to analyze the shows, I fully expected that. I’d just like to be able to know what shows have/haven’t been analyzed, and a way to see what is currently being analyzed (like it did with Brooklyn Nine-Nine).

Do you happen to know where the temp folder is? At least that way I could dig around and see what is still waiting. Space shouldn’t be an issue as there’s ~60gb of space on the windows drive (the media is elsewhere)

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There is no easy way to see the overall progress of intro detection.
You can check a particular episode’s Plex media info XML to see if it already has an intro marker.

</Media>
<Guid id="tmdb://1971735"/>
<Guid id="tvdb://346817"/>
<Chapter id="34079" filter="thumb=34079" tag="Chapter 2" index="1" startTimeOffset="125" endTimeOffset="90591" thumb="/library/media/1290213/chapterImages/1"/>
<Chapter id="34080" filter="thumb=34080" tag="Chapter 3" index="2" startTimeOffset="90591" endTimeOffset="632507" thumb="/library/media/1290213/chapterImages/2"/>
<Chapter id="34081" filter="thumb=34081" tag="Chapter 4" index="3" startTimeOffset="632507" endTimeOffset="1374830" thumb="/library/media/1290213/chapterImages/3"/>
<Chapter id="34082" filter="thumb=34082" tag="Chapter 5" index="4" startTimeOffset="1374830" endTimeOffset="1464960" thumb="/library/media/1290213/chapterImages/4"/>
<Marker id="332898" type="intro" startTimeOffset="1114" endTimeOffset="86874">
<Attributes id="332898"/>
</Marker>

A list of all episodes and whether they have an intro or not can only be obtained by reading the Plex database with external software.
You can do this using the GitHub - WebTools-NG/WebTools-NG: WebTools Next Generation for Plex software and its “Export Tools” module.

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There is no easy way to see the overall progress of intro detection

Unfortunate, it would be nice to know how far along in the process it is. I have noticed that it’s doing something as my hard drive is ever-so-slowly ticking down in free space.

You can check a particular episode’s Plex media info XML to see if it already has an intro marker.

Thanks for this, I did recall reading something about xml but wasn’t aware it was in the plex app itself, thought it was a file generated next to the media (but didn’t see one when digging).

A list of all episodes and whether they have an intro or not can only be obtained by reading the Plex database with external software.

Also unfortunate to hear, would be nice if there was like a little star or something on shows to know.

Will take a look at this, thanks a ton!

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