[MPlayer-users] TIVO simulator

[Luke Harrison]

On Sun, 12 May 2002 15:45:33 -0400
"Brian J. Murrell" <05087da252d095210bdf8734d1efbb5c at interlinx.bc.ca> wrote:

> On Sun, May 12, 2002 at 08:16:46PM +0100, Stephen Davies wrote:
> > 
> > For me that's just mpegencoder >file & mplayer file
> 
> One thing that is _really_ annoying for this though is that MPlayer
> exits if you try to seek off the end of the file.  I would like much
> better for it to just skip to the last frame and try to read more from
> the file before deciding to exit.
> 
> > > 4. Fast forward 5 minutes (to skip commercials).
> > 
> > Sure.
> 
> I have a better plan for that.  I was going to have mplayer just
> skip to (i.e. search for as fast as CPU would allow) black frames
> (that part is written and works) and have a key to initiate it, then
> you would need just a few keystrokes to skip an entire commercial
> break.
> 
> The reality though is that on my Athlon TB 800Mhz, full CPU speed
> decoding of an MPEG1 or MPEG4 (whatever mencoder produces) is only 3
> times the framerate of standard play.  I can use seek 30/seek 5/seek 1
> faster than 3 times to skip commercials.
> 
> So my second thought on this idea was to have the capture tool look
> for the black frames as it was capturing and write the frame numbers
> out to a "bookmark" file (simply a file with frame numbers).  A
> "bookmark" facility in mplayer would then make it easy to jump from
> black frame to black frame.
> 
> This bookmark feature of mplayer could be used for all kinds of other
> uses too, like marking where the chapter breaks are when ripping a DVD
> into an MPEG/AVI/whatever file.
> 
> I looked briefly at mp1e for where to hook this feature in but decided
> I needed more time that I had to understand mp1e enough to make it
> work.  Also, mplayer does not have a "skip to frame" feature, although
> it does have a "skip to byte" feature.  The first pass at this feature
> could use byte numbers instead of frame numbers to prove the concept.
> Some day.  :-)
> 
> b.
> 
> -- 
> Brian J. Murrell
> 

Here's an idea: i don't know the internals of MPlayer too well, but
would it be possible for a black_screen_detection filter, to have mplayer drop
a lot of frames, I mean a typcial commercial has a good .5-1 second of black,
and if the framerate is 30, you'd theoritically only need 1 or 2 frames, right? So you could tell 
Mplayer to drop 90% of of the framrate while looking for black frames, that would speed things up, no?
You'd probably get a few mis-detections if it so happens it hits a black frame or two in the movie, but
hey it may work, eh?

Again i don't even know if this is possible, just tossing an idea out there

-- 
Luke Harrison
luke at vv.carleton.ca