The VideoLAN Forums

Imagine a subtitle file. If located in the same folder as a movie file, and named the same usually, it will automatically load it. It looks at the timestamps and then inserts the text where they say.
I would very much like to see something of this sort for muting or skipping. Say a movie has a boring part or some very offensive language. It should be extremely simple to make something that does something like this

12:23:02 - 12:26:04 Mute 3 seconds of sound
or say
1:52:25 - 2:06:28 Skip 14 minutes of movie

For families who don't really want to listen to swearing or want to see certain aspects of movies, this would be a Godsend. People could make the files themselves and not have to know how to demux, mux and edit audio files. We could leave original movies alone and just load a mutefile/skipfile to skip or mute in certain parts.

I plan on being persistent with this request. A forum post is the beginning, I am hoping for a positive response here, but I am also willing to email people is need be. If I knew any sort of advanced languages, I would attempt to do help make this, but I don't so... here I am. Imploring you to hear my request and implement it

Thanks a TON for reading!
-BASiQ

Well, lack of standard for this makes it not done.

Well, lack of standard for this makes it not done.

But why would it have to lack a standard? It could be used for anything, yet be the same for all. A subtitle file is simply a file full of timestamps. Why could this not be? But instead of inserting words, it inserts mutes or skips. It is not as nonstandard as one would think. Every file in VLC plays sound through it, and every file plays using the same progress bar. It is as standard as anything would get.

Maybe you could make something similar, maybe not so specific. But SOMETHING like this would be something very useful. It is the same principle of clicking the mute button manually, or clicking on the scroll bar and scrolling... But done somewhat automatically.

To get something to communicate from the subtitle core back to other reas of VLC is something rather difficult atm. Again, one of those features that is gonna be implemented as soon as someone sends a patch as far as I'm concerned.

Well, I had no idea something like this would be so difficult. I expected it to be a easy thing to do. Guess I was wrong. Well, dont forget about this, but I guess for now, it will be put on the back burner with the other to to's... Thanks anyways...


-BASiQ