If you don’t want a profanity filter, then you don’t have to use it. But you cannot force us how we want to watch things. Everyone has their own choice and free will after all…
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What a lot of people in this and some other threads do not seem to realize is that adding a feature any feature requires extensive testing in every section of the program thereby using programming and testing resources taking those resources away from other sections. It is not about choice as much as it is about using finite resources for a feature that would only be used by a very few people and even those people can get the same effect by using various third party tools to preprocess their media.
This feature is unnecessary inside Plex and if implemented it would be used by very few and has a HUGE potential for bugs therefore it should not be implemented by Plex developers.
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Yeah, you can ruin the art you watch all you want out of silly moral sensibilities. What I can do is point out that the developers of this app shouldn’t be responsible for helping you do this, mainly because they have a many more important things to be working on.
As others have pointed out there are utilities that exist hag will help you shield yourself from language. Plex doesn’t need to help you.
Plex has limited resources and something like this would require considerable work to satisfy the censorship desires of very few people.
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For those saying Plex developers shouldn’t spend time on this, if Plex didn’t remove the ability to have Plug-ins then the community could have spent their time on this.
As has been mentioned multiple times, best would be to implement EDL support and that will enable many uses of moving around in your media.
I dont have much faith Plex will build in this feature.
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Couldn’t agree more about the plugins, but I’d rather Plex re-implement a plug-in feature rather than implement silly features that very few users will use.
Let’s face it though, Plex is nearing being done implementing features geared towards local libraries. More and more of Plex is changing solely to serve its streaming business of shifty movies and tv shows no other streaming service wants.
I can’t imagine there are any other reasons for introducing ad supported Free content. Could it be to distant the platform from Piracy concerns that are flashed across the pages of the internet. Maybe it’s something mundane like staying in business.
As for a Profanity filter, best use case is at present is Home user Filters and manually checking Content rating, not perfect but a possible work around. 
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Exactly… 
It may take time and resources, which I believe more than one person has offered to chip in on, but the thing those of you that don’t want this feature fail to realize is this would also attract more people. More people equals larger community, larger community equals more people to contribute to better features and ideas. I completely support your desire to watch whatever you want, however you want. All those of us that voted for this feature want is the ability to do the same. If I knew more about coding, EDL, and API’s which is what I’m assuming it would take to make this happen, I would work on it myself, but I don’t. Also, in reality, companies that already do this type of thing like VidAngel, TVG, Clearplay and I’m sure there are others, would likely do all of the work and all plex would have to do would be to enable the plugin, or as previously stated edl support. Because of what a feature like this could open up (edl, api, plugins) isn’t it worth exploring simply for all the other benefits? I get this would take someone’s time, I get it would cost money which I’m guessing could be completely crowd funded in no time flat, and I get that some of you don’t want it. However, perhaps its time to celebrate our differences for what something like this could accomplish, instead of bickering back and forth (whole thread with opposing opinions) getting nowhere fast.
My opinion is its worthy of looking at but lets all concentrate on the basics. What else could you (all of you) do if things like edl, api, and plugins were supported again?
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I am wondering the same thing
I think what I might do to get around this in the meantime is to demux the audio tracks and subtitles from a video file and run a script against a library of words and phrases that would create mute points in the tracks at particular timestamps, save the audio tracks as censored versions, and mux them back into the video file as additional/optional audio tracks for me to choose from.
The Clearplay extension is currently testing out titles with Plex. After installing the Clearplay chrome extension try it out for free with the movie Seabiscuit at Seabiscuit (2003) | Plex is where to watch your movies and TV
Appreciate the link to this, just ran a couple movies and shows through it I’ve been holding back showing our 8 year old due to a few cuss words here and there and this works great! Very easy to figure out and runs relatively quicker than expected.
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As a father with young children… i REALLY NEED this feature. There are dozens of movies i love that i’d like for her to watch, with just a few inappropriate scenes.
I don’t want to edit the movie, nor do i want it always to play the ‘redacted’ version of the movie… but if it is being watched under the kids profile i’d like it to automatically look for a text file with the timestamps for skips and mutes, and skip the inappropriate parts for my kid.
it can work just like subtitles - you can even have different versions of these EDL files which you can choose just as you choose different versions of subtitles, or disable entirely if wanted. Some files can filter less than others - your choice… and these files can be editable by the user since they are text files just reside in the same folder as the movie.
it’s funny how some are so ‘offended’ about this lol… it’s like being offended that you want to take the pickles and onions out of your hamburger instead of being happy with the chef’s artistic masterpiece, or offended that you let your kids read ‘the great illustrated classics’ kid versions rather than making them read the complete and unabridged book before they are ready for it, or being offended that I let my kid listen to the highlights of Beethoven’s 7th symphony today instead of listening to the whole thing (with her limited attention span and lack of musical knowledge necessary for appreciation), or mad that i fast forward through commercials.
It’s no different than television studio’s editing a ‘tv’ version of the movie… same exact thing.
This ask is really just an automated version of me sitting in front of the tv with my hand on the fast forward and mute button… which most people with kids have to do at some point anyways.
i don’t know what an edl file looks like which sounds like overkill (it’s not like we are rendering a new copy of the movie), but if it looks like a subtitle file it could just be structured like this:
-
A numeric counter indicating the index of the redaction. -
Start and end time of the redaction separated by –> characters -
First word is redaction type (Skip or Mute), rest can be ignored as comment -
A blank line indicating the end of the redaction section.
make the extension something like *.rdn (for redaction)
1
00:05:00,400 --> 00:05:15,300
Skip this due to excessive violence
2
00:05:16,400 --> 00:05:25,300
Mute
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does not have such a huge potential for bugs… less even than subtitles since subtitles have to format and place stuff on the screen
(I’m a software engineer on enterprise systems for the past 20 years myself, it’s really not so big)
It could even use the subtitle parser to read the file in the first place, so you’re basically reusing existing code.
- parse the file using subtitle parser (reuse existing api)
- skip timestamps using same functionality used to skip intro’s (again - code reuse)
- mute timestamps - that’s already done too…
my bet is, it’s a 5 day job for a single developer who is familiar with the code… 10 days tops, testing for 2 days. Maybe another week per UI to tie in the dropdown options that mimic what’s already there for selecting .srt files
VERY LITTLE new code is needed
in fact, on a chrome browser i would suspect it could be done entirely in java-script as an extension in less than 200 lines of code… Unfortunately that wouldn’t work for me when viewing through my android app, or fire TV
New Plex forum post…
“There’s no audio to any of my Quentin Tarantino movies”“
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I recently began digging into this again, while watching a movie on VidAngel, and cringing at the amount of degradation a video goes through when it’s streamed. The amount of blockiness… shudder
As I’ve started looking into this again, EDL files seem by far the way to go. It’s a long standing standard, and should be fairly straight forward to implement. There’s only a small handful of “skip” types, and the notation for when to apply an “edit” is also rather straightforward.
As others have noted, Kodi already has native support for EDL files.
The most “feature rich” implementation would be if a user could import an EDL file, containing all of the possible edits, and at watch time, you’re able to select which edits you actually want or not. The MVP version would be much more simple. If someone, say VidAngel, uses EDL’s on their backend (which seems likely… or some equivalent), then perhaps a Plex user could select the filters they want on a service like VidAngel, download the associated EDL file for the movie, copy that to the server folder where you have the movie stored, and (optimally) hit play.
I’m unsure offhand if there would be any limiting factors to having it all run server side, but without digging into it any, it seems like this should be a viable solution. This would remove the need for any fancy browser extensions, additional plugins, or worry about what device you might be watching from, since you’d get the same playback experience across all devices.
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After five years, I think it’s clear that Plex doesn’t care about using that investment capital they were so proud of on new features. They’ve done one update on the blog this year. Nothing new in Plex Labs.
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It’s sad people want to butcher art because they can’t deal with things outside their comfort zone.
It’s sad that some people don’t understand that parents would like to be able to show movies but remove age inappropriate material for children.
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You know, even some of what use to be edited for television back in the 90’s and 00’s was heavily chopped up and neutered back then for broadcast and cable television that even now, some films that have profanity have been relaxed and just garner the standard PARENTAL GUIDANCE NECESSARY for content that may be of risk to children. I don’t understand this concept of making film, which is categorically artwork, that needs to be insistently scanned and altered for a child’s viewing when it’s content and material was never produced with their viewership originally in mind. You can’t take the SAW franchise and suddenly think it’s somehow going to be rated for a child just because you’re lambasting your grievances of your personal subjective views, which aren’t of the artists of the original content.
If my parents did their job when I was a kid, then I wouldn’t be here today as a witness and survivor of many of the old childhood traumatic experiences of those I endured with The Brave Little Toaster, All Dogs go to Heaven, We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, The Land Before Time, An American Tale, and Rock a Doodle. They just don’t give children a good dose of reality like they use to anymore. And here parents today are now too careful about what their children see.
The other issue that’s been rising is now that Plex is furthering their good graces with multiple media conglomerates, how far are these connections going as far as to having Plex alter the SAAS for the media conglomerates and their investors favor.
Point being is that the prominence of studio logos or listing of studios on the film details has been manipulated in a way that’s dumb and alarming. Who’s to say that these film studios aren’t going to allow someone’s personal views of censorship be further implemented now.
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Odd that I thought I previously posted a link to at least one product you can use to accomplish this by outputting a clean copy of the files outside of Plex but then Plex can be used to play them.
Here is the information:
This solution is not super easy to setup/configure but it works great to accomplish having content filtered for any language or words you wish to be removed.
Cleanvid:
Python script to parse SRT files and re-encode video using ffmpeg or output an EDL file.
You will need Python and ffmpeg installed for it to work.
Can also be ran in Docker.
Usage:
cleanvid [-h] [-s ] -i [-o ]
[–plex-auto-skip-json ]
[–plex-auto-skip-id ]
[–subs-output ] [-w ]
[-l ] [-p ] [-e] [-f] [–subs-only] [–offline]
[–edl] [–json] [-r] [-b] [-v VPARAMS] [-a APARAMS] [-d]
Examples:
cleanvid -i testvideo.mp4
cleanvid -s testvideo.srt -i testvideo.mp4
I also found using the -f flag lets you keep all of the closed-captioning for words outside of filtering in the event you want it on or are watching it muted.
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