auto skip unwanted parts of a video

[thomass]

Children are vulnerable to porn or violence scenes. In addition to this, this scenes may be wanted to skip because of moral or religious issues. I think, only a few of us have no problem with facing these scenes when watching a film with their children(if any). The procedure created for substitle can be used for this issue. An editible file ( A text doc for example) can be imported by program. Procedur is simple: Vlcplayer will autoskip the frames (or seconds ) written on the document when it plays the video. I think this would be very useful to most of us,also a database would be created like substitles.

also for interactive usage: A key could be set to add a new 'skip interval' like a key which is already used to add new bookmarks on many programs.( if user enable this prop. then (for example) pressing a key twice would adds their intervals to skip list.) This could be a starting point for your brainstormings.

visual improvement: Skipped parts of a video could be also disappeared from the timeline to make usage esaier. At each skip point, a small (optional) remark could be used to inform the user.

maybe a voice muting? :For rude part of dialogs this could be usefull. Similar to skipping part of a video staff, unwanted part of sound part of a video may be filtered (in other words, auto mute function on predetermined intervals.) On sound files skipping could be used.

Thank you for your interest....

[VLC_help]

This has been REQUESTED multiple times.

[mikeloeven]

i agree with you that this feature should be supported but the biggest issue with this is the fact that most people who encode films and tv shows will probibly not spend the time to make these files. in otherwords you would have to watch the ehtire thing your self and insert the times to skip manually, if your not familiar with the file format this can be very diffucult for the standart home user to do. as of now i think the more logical solution would be not to show your children movies that contain offensive material. simply going through and cutting out scenes with references to political religious or sexual themes can also destroy the entire plot of the movie if done incorrectly.

[thomass]

As I imagined, this process does not effect the real file, only creates and read a text file nearby to movie. I think, - to edit this text file- a home user could press a button twice to create such interval, there should be no need to know about file formats. A subtitle editor like process, and interface. In addition, this should not be done by film producers, but -like subtitle staff- by people who wants similar 'cuttings' could share their files on a website. Or a classification system could be generated.
My first concern to request this feature was the following: There is some kind of films which are very good and clean with some small exception parts( includes scenes that are not proper for a child), then a father could scan this kind of films and set point to skip their intervals to watch this film with his children.
My programing level is really low.

[thomass]

if you also search for this:

for mplayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/edl.html

also for xbmc: wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=EDL_(commercial_skipping)_and_SceneMarker_support

check also: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=89914&p=296778#p296778

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Sure, patches are welcome.

[rogerdpack]

maybe a lua plugin is possible?

[VLC_help]

It should be.

[davidjahan]

It could be implemented by a reach play list (with begin and end show times) very simply

[rogerdpack]

That works, but causes like a 0.5s "gap" between sections (plus the window sizes down then resizes up) so isn't awesomelly effective.

[rogerdpack]

I've had pretty good success with parsing subtitles to find "unwanted profanity" and muting based on that, then nobody has to actually do it manually. Oh and I don't miss them one bit, and since it just mutes, you can still catch the storyline fine
But that's just me.
https://github.com/rdp/sensible-cinema
is the project
-roger-

[thomass]

From Readme file of the Sensible-camera: Note that the process can take several hours, so budget some time for it. This is what actually I'm trying to keep away from. A good alternative for your app is already avaliable: VirtualDub. with enabling the option video>"Direct stream copy" it has a really good speed(around 10 minutes). Thanks for this app. However what I need is different (as described on first post) .

[thomass]

That works, but causes like a 0.5s "gap" between sections (plus the window sizes down then resizes up) so isn't awesomelly effective.

0.5s is ok if I can edit the parts easily( ie on a text file) ? Could you generate one? Or How can I do this?

[rogerdpack]

Ok I updated the readme to try to be more clear that you don't always have to wait several hours (it has realtime options available, too)


I have updated the VLC wiki with an example of muting/skipping:

http://wiki.videolan.org/XSPF#Example_o ... extensions

It's not quite as bad as I remember it.

Just be aware that if you playback DVD's in VLC, the timestamps will be off [1] but I have found timestamps to work quite well with video files that have working indexes (i.e. most files, but not certain types of mpeg), so it might work well for video files.

One thing I'm not quite certain of is whether VLC jumps "forward" or "backward" to the nearest i-frame when seeking. If it at times jumps backward, then your XSPF file might still be inaccurate, so might need some extra padding of numbers to ensure it avoids the [questionable content].

re: database of EDL's: sensible cinema hopes to eventually have one. I mean it already does, for like 20 movies, but it's still in development.

I could even add an option to sensible cinema to make it spew out VLC XSPF files if you so desired (it already used to, but I disabled it since VLC didn't seek quite right in DVD's)


re: virtualdub: windows only (it does do frame accurate splitting, apparently, which is nice). It also didn't work with mpeg2 streams when I tried, it, which made it non-ideal originally. Mine could definitely use more speed

Cheers!
-roger-

[1] http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/4

[rogerdpack]

Oh I forgot about this project:

http://code.google.com/p/movie-content-editor (python libvlc wrapper with EDL support).

(and mplayer also does EDL's, as also XBMC and...a few others).

[thomass]

Ok I updated the readme to try to be more clear that you don't always have to wait several hours (it has realtime options available, too)

Sorry for the delay.I didn't know this. I'll try it. You're right about this that VirtualDub has no support for several formats..
Thanks for this detailed message.

[rogerdpack]

See also viewtopic.php?f=32&t=89466 for continued discussion

[rogerdpack]

PLEASE CONTINUE TO THE ABOVE LINK FOR MORE DISCUSSION

[mederi]

Media Enhancement Data support could be the answer. VLC has the power to introduce its own standards.

I think that ordinary SRT file is all what is needed. It can be easily created by any subtitle editor and some special commads could be stated directly in subtitle text ([SKIP], [MUTE], [EFFECT], normal subtitles, ...). Then SRT filename extension can be just renamed to some other format recognized by VLC. The new universal feature could also display another subtitles on the screen (dual subtitles).

[joecuppa]

I don't follow the boards closely, but I thought it might be important to point this out since no one in this thread has yet. For teachers, the ability to censor pieces of a film can make a huge difference. Beyond the fact that we sometimes have explicit rules against showing anything about PG or PG-13, sometimes there are cultural sensitivities which create additional restrictions. One small bit of a movie can be impossible to show in a religious school for example because they say "Jesus" in a certain way. Or in a Muslim country, a movie that was PG in the USA might be out-of-bounds because it shows a little bit of a woman's bum. So this could be an important feature for teachers, especially in private schools.

[mederi]

The idea has been introduced in Subtitler (lite) mod, VLC Extension Lua script. The solution suggests to use various effect tags (commands) within ordinary subtitle format like SubRip srt. Current version of the extension requires to use a button presser, some external helper for periodic pressing of the button in the dialog box.

[tuberoseinrain]

It is extremely easy to make skip(s) in the playback of a video (and possibly an audio) file in VLC. Follow these steps:

1. Open the video file in VLC.

2. Click on the “File” tab and the last option would be “Save Playlist”. Click on it. (This is how it looks on mac, and I assume it should be the same on Windows version of VLC as well. If not, you only need to find the “Save Playlist” option in one of the tabs.)

3. In the opened window, write an optional name and make sure the selected format is M3U (.m3u). Then save it exactly in the folder in which the video (or audio) file is located.

4. Then go to that folder and open the created m3u file with TextEdit on mac (or with Notepad on Windows).

5. If, for example, the name of your video file is “School.mkv”, then the text in the m3u file is something like the following text.
(For those who might not know, the “.mkv” in the mentioned name is not a part of the actual name and it is actually the format of the file in our example and it can be different for different types of files. So the name of the file in our example is “School”)



#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:617,School.mkv
School.mkv



6. In this step you need to add the following command to the above-mentioned text:

Let’s imagine the video file’s duration is 10:17 and you want VLC to skip from 2:47 to 4:51 during the playback. For this purpose, you first need to convert these times to seconds.

For converting times to seconds, you can use this free online tool:

https://www.tools4noobs.com/online_tools/hh_mm_ss_to_seconds/


So based on our example, you want VLC to play the video file from second 1 (0:01) until second 167 (2:47) and then from second 291 (4:51) until the end which is second 617 (10:17). So the code you should prepare will look like this:



#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=1
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=167
School.mkv
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=291
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=617
School.mkv


7. Then you should add this command to the original text in the m3u file. The final result based on our example looks like the following code. Please note that you should delete the “School.mkv” which is mentioned in the third line of the original m3u file:


#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:617,School.mkv
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=1
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=167
School.mkv
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=291
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=617
School.mkv


8. Save the changes. Then instead of opening the video file, open the m3u file with VLC.

That’s It!!! VLC will play the portions of the video you have indicated in the m3u file.


A few points to mention:

1. If you want multiple skips in different parts of the video, you can simply add more same commands. For instance, in the following code there are two skips (from 2:47 until 4:51 and from 7:02 until 9:25):

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:617,School.mkv
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=1
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=167
School.mkv
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=291
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=422
School.mkv
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=565
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=617
School.mkv



2. Don’t change the number that is mentioned in the second line of the original m3u file. In my example it is 617, but it will be different in other examples. So you don’t need to change it. (It is actually the total duration of the video file in seconds).

3. These skips will not ruin the lip-sync or subtitle-sync and everything will work well.

4. Don’t forget to include the video file’s format next to the name of the file. As you see above, I have written (.mkv) wherever I have mentioned the name of the video file.


Good Luck

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Yes that's one way. The real problem is getting somebody trustworthy to make the edit list, much more so that the getting the playlist to handle the edit list.