Ok so some TV series will show like 1-2 minutes of content for the episode you are about to watch that helps set the stage for the episode your about to watch.
BUT… other shows, they instead spend 1-2 minutes recapping their last episode with a “previously on”. For example the Amazing Race or Big Brother and lots of other shows they will spend a bunch of time before the intro recapping the prior episode stuff.
I think it would be cool to have the “skip intro”
Button appear at the VERY beginning of an episode during the time that the episode is doing the “previously on” stuff. If your watching bunch of episodes back to back it can get annoying watching a few minutes of “previously on” stuff.
Or better yet make the above option available to have “skip intro” immediately show up when a shows starts but make that configurable at the series level so that for the series that do a lot of “previously on” you could allow an earlier “skip intro” and for ones that don’t do a “previously on” and instead show 1-2 minutes of new content before the intro have it turned off for those.
Edit 1:
I’m not asking for Plex to figure out if the pre-intro is a “previously on” or not. Us humans can figure that out be deciding if they want to hit the “skip intro” button or not as they are watching the pre-intro stuff. I’m simply asking for the “skip intro” button to immediately pop up at the beginning of an episode and to be able to control that on a per series editable season setting called “display skip intro button immediately upon start of episode instead of at start of intro”
I had a similar idea but was thinking we could provide our own XML file or something from MCEBuddy or similar tool that we manually defined as “previously on” or unique intros that wont be auto detected or ones that are too short.
Just have the starting time of the intro as 00:00:00 locked in and if it’s a recap that I want to watch, the button will be there from the beginning, but I don’t have to click it… When the intro starts or when I’m ready to skip past the intro, I can hit Skip Intro and skip right to the new episode.
@ZeroFux Where do you modify the starting time of the intro and lock it in? I just went through all the “edit” menus for an episode, season, and series and don’t see the intro time located anywhere. So curious where we would go to “lock in” a 00:00:00 intro time. I agree this would work for me if this is something that can be done in mass and automatically to everything, but if its something that needs to be done manually on each individual episode that wouldn’t work well for large collections.
Ahhhh ok, I was hoping you knew how to do it already hehe. I agree 100% having it just start at 00:00:00 immediately (or have it be an enabled/disable option related to intros) would be PERFECT. And they could even just set it up so it only displays for the first 5-10 seconds and if its not clicked on then at the beginning then start hiding it again until when the intro music starts up. That way if someone wants to skip the intro they could do it right away, but if they haven’t already pressed the button then having it auto hide after 5-10 seconds will ensure that people don’t have to then stare at a “skip intro” button for a few minutes if they are intentionally trying to watch the “previously on” or whatever pre-intro might be going on.
I think you could go into the database directly and change it but would not recommend to do so. Database could become inconsistent and next Analyze Job would probably undo it anyway.
@Devs how about some sort of a switch to force intro start timestamp to 0? I would really love it.
The few shows I’ve tried it on, it has popped up the “skip intro” button immediately when the episode started. 2 of the shows were that had a “previously on” or recap it popped up right away. It must vary show by show or maybe even episode by episode.
Skip intro is awesome! I would love to see the option of skipping the previously seen segment for those who want it. I depend upon the previously seen segment a lot and don’t want to skip it, but love to skip the every episode repeated intro segment. I get what others are saying here for those who don’t want the previously seen parts.
Now that we have Skip Outro, it seems the tech used for that can be used for this feature? Skip recap option? - #2 by tom80H
Whilst that comment is true, detection could just use this new algorithm? @tom80H Let me know what you think please, if possible.
I don’t know the ins and outs of the algorithm but I doubt it can be used for that purpose (where does it start, end, what establishes a recap and how is it recognizably different from the “main event”…).
Yes I think, they could add another button to skip only the previously on part before the intro and then the intro button. I think Plex could compare the episode with the other episodes of the season and try to detect as many as possible of the same scenes and then it detects it. And for all people who don’t won’t to press two buttons at the beginning of every episode Plex could integrate a setting where you can say that both should be skip only by pressing for one time.
I’m finding a lot of shows insist on putting lengthy “previously on” segments on their shows. Fine if I’m watching over the course of weeks, but spending 3 minutes being reminded of what I watched 5 minutes ago is not exactly fun
I understand this would be harder to implement than intro detection (it’ll be different every time so it’s hard to scan for). The solution seems to me to be to just allow manual marker placement. If the detection gets it right, hooray. If not, I can move my markers manually to correct it
