mpv typically decodes and filters at least 2 frames before starting
playback. This happens during seeks, as well as when playback starts
from the beginning of the file.
skip-logo.lua receives notifications for all filtered frames, even
during seeking. It should interrupt during seeking, so as a crude
heuristic, it ignored all frames while the player was seeking. This does
not mean all these frames are skipped due to seeking (thus it's a "crude
hueristic"). In particular, it means that the first 2 frames of a video
cannot be skipped, since they're filtered within the playback restart
phase (equivalent to "seeking").
Fix this by making the heuristic slightly less crude. Since we observe
the property as "none", the property is not actually read until we do it
explicitly. By not reading it during seeking, we can let the frames
internally queue up (vf_fingerprint discards them in a ringbuffer-like
fashion if they're too many). Then, if seeking ends, we get the current
playback timestamp, and check queued up frames that are at or after that
timestamp. (In some ways, this duplicates what the player's seeking
logic does.)
A disadvantage is that this is racy. While playback-time is guaranteed
to be set when seeking changes from false to true, playback could
already have progressed to the next frame (or more) before the script
gets time to react. In theory, we could add a seek restart hook or so,
but I don't want to. A property that returns the last playback restart
time would also do it, but feels to special. Not an important problem
in practice anyway.
skip-logo.lua is just what I wanted to have. Explanations are on the top
of that file. As usual, all documentation threatens to remove this stuff
all the time, since this stuff is just for me, and unlike a normal user
I can afford the luxuary of hacking the shit directly into the player.
vf_fingerprint is needed to support this script. It needs to scale down
video frames as part of its operation. For that, it uses zimg. zimg is
much faster than libswscale and generates more correct output. (The
filter includes a runtime fallback, but it doesn't even work because
libswscale fucks up and can't do YUV->Gray with range adjustment.)
Note on the algorithm: seems almost too simple, but was suggested to me.
It seems to be pretty effective, although long time experience with
false positives is missing. At first I wanted to use dHash [1][2], which
is also pretty simple and effective, but might actually be worse than
the implemented mechanism. dHash has the advantage that the fingerprint
is smaller. But exact matching is too unreliable, and you'd still need
to determine the number of different bits for fuzzier comparison. So
there wasn't really a reason to use it.
[1] https://pypi.org/project/dhash/
[2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/529-Kind-of-Like-That.html
wm4