Running a server

Intro and credits detection

How Wren TV finds intros and credits, for the Skip Intro and Skip Credits buttons and up next.

Players show Skip Intro and Skip Credits, and start the next-episode countdown at the credits. The server finds where intros and credits are in two ways.

#From chapters

Many files have chapters, and some name them. A chapter named like an intro or credits is used directly:

• Intro: Intro, Introduction, Opening, Opening Credits, OP, OP1, Title Sequence, Main Titles, Theme Song, …
• Credits: Credits, End Credits, Ending, Closing, ED, ED1, Outro, End Titles, …

An intro chapter must start in the first half of the file and last between 5 seconds and 5 minutes. A credits chapter must start in the second half. Chapters named just "Chapter 3" or a number carry no meaning and are ignored.

Chapter names are always used. They're read when a file is probed, so there's nothing to set up.

#From audio fingerprints

Most episodes have no named chapters. For those, a background job compares the audio of episodes in the same season. The stretch of audio that two episodes share near the start is the intro, and near the end the credits:

• It looks for the intro in the first 10 minutes, 15 seconds to 3 minutes long.
• It looks for the credits in the last 6 minutes, at least 15 seconds long.
• Each episode is compared with up to 3 neighbouring episodes, so a cold open that moves the intro around, or one episode with a different song, doesn't break the season.

The fingerprints survive different encodes and volume levels, so a season mixed from different releases still works. Seasons need at least two episodes.

The job runs shortly after the server starts, after scans add episodes, and every half hour. It only analyzes seasons with new, changed or not-yet-compared episodes. Where a file has both, chapters win.

#Turning fingerprinting off

Fingerprinting decodes a few minutes of audio from each episode, once. On a slow or metered mount (cloud or debrid storage) you may want to turn it off. Untick Detect intros and credits by comparing episode audio in Manage → Settings, or set:

yamlmarkers:
  fingerprint: false

Chapter-named intros and credits still work.