Josh Hendrickson
No one likes longwinded intros that get in the way of real content. You’re probably not reading this intro right now, are you? You skipped right to that second paragraph to get to the meat of this news piece. Just like you always skip the intro when watching TV on Netflix… and now Plex. That’s right; Plex will now let you bypass that musical credits you don’t need.
Let me rip the bandaid off on the most important piece of information you need for Plex’s new Skip Intro feature. It’s currently a Plex Pass subscriber-only function. If you don’t have a Plex Pass, you’re going to have to sit through the intro. Or go out and buy a Plex pass. But for everyone else, here’s the good news.
Thanks to an update to Plex Media Server, Plex can now scan all your TV shows for intros (the music and credits at the beginning of the show). It doesn’t matter if it’s a DVR’d episode of The Masked Singer, or your legally ripped copy of Firefly (you have excellent taste, I might add). Thanks to some wizardry from Plex’s teams of engineers, the feature should work with just about any TV show, no matter how you put it on your server.
According to Plex, the process starts by “creating an audio ‘fingerprint’ out of the histogram of each episode in a given season of each TV show. It turns out that the vast majority of show intros share common audio signatures for all their episodes (at least for a specific season). After applying some heuristics and a little bit of Special Sauce™, we’re able to predict (in almost all cases) precisely when the intro starts and ends.”
You’ll notice some quibbling of words; it’s early days for the feature, so it might not always get it right. But over time, the process should improve.
What matters is, the next time you decide you’re going to binge-watch all of Farscape or some other binge-worthy tv show on your Plex server, you can skip the intros.
Source: Plex
