[MPlayer-users] TIVO simulator

[Brian J. Murrell]

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
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