I was wondering if any programmers out there have came up with a way to inject or insert commercials into their media?
I like watching shows from different time periods and I know lots of people out there absolutely cannot stand commercials yet I am sure there are a handful of commercials in their memory that they enjoyed… I looked in the forums and found a few people asking for a similar feature for various reasons, so I am hoping that someone out there who knows programming was able to come up with an addon to plex that could like track where the current media is playing, pause, stop, load a random commercial or two from a playlist, then resume playback of the original media from the proper time stamp.
Hopefully this topic doesn’t ruffle too many feathers, I am quite aware of the majorities opinion on commercials lol
My question and objection come from the same idea. I cannot understand even one legitimate reason to want to do that except if you are trying to make money from your Plex server and avoid the forbidden action of charging for access.
To me I believe Plex should not allow any plug-in or other way to force advertising onto Plex.
There is a way to do that, however, that already exists and that is to use a video editor to insert the ads into the actual video before Plex ever sees them. That could even be automated in various ways. But Plex has no business allowing server owners to artificially insert ads into the streamed media.
If someone does want to do that they can write their own server to do it.
It’d still be best to be a manual process, since inserting ads randomly into a video could possibly interrupt a scene mid-conversation. Which means you’d need to watch a movie file yourself, look for the best gaps in scenes to put in a commercial, and either cut in a movie, or place special markers (chapters?). Then, using another program, you could design a video streamer that could look for a commercial marker, pause the stream mid-play, play a different vid, then resume the original.
I HIGHLY doubt you could do this with Plex, as it’d require editing the code itself to allow for detection of these special markers, and to insert video from a separate file mid-stream without hiccups.
The best idea I have is to use the pre-roll feature to play a random ad between episodes. I think pre-roll will choose one file at random if more than one are selected? Not sure as I don’t use it myself.
As @Divideby0 pointed out any automagic way of doing it during the show will likely make bad edit decisions.
