by Flack » Sun Nov 24, 2019 10:46 am
As construction continues on my shop/home theater, I'm preparing some of the other pieces. One idea I've had for a while is coming up a way to simulate the theater experience. I'm not talking about people talking and kicking the back of my chair throughout the film (maybe in version 2.0...) but instead what I want to do is generate short playlists based on the movie I plan to watch.
Here's the concept: before watching a film, I would run a script that would prepare a playlist. The playlist should include commercials/teasers for theaters, a random number of movie trailers, and then the movie. I want to build a lot of randomness into the script so that I am surprised by the results when I start the playlist.
To prepare for this, I have downloaded 50 or so theater/drive-in commercials, and nearly a thousand movie trailers. It's almost 2020, folks. Hard drive space is no longer a thing.
Here's a bit of pseudo code to explain what I'm thinking.
01. Run script, point script to movie. (ex: "Meatballs (1979).mkv")
02. Extract the year of the movie from the filename ("1979")
03. Randomly pick 1-3 commercials from /commercials
04. Randomly pick 2-4 movie trailers from the same year as the movie ("1979")
05. Generate an m3u playlist with: random commercials, random trailers, and the movie.
The idea being before I go out to the theater to watch Meatballs, I would run the script and it would generate the playlist. By the time I got to the movie theater, I would instead run the playlist and be treated to a few commercials, some random trailers, and then the movie. It's no fun if I build the playlist manually, because I'll know what the trailers are going to be. I think it'll be way more fun this way.
Here are the random variables I want to build in: number of commercials (randomly selected from a given range, like 1-3), and number of trailers to add (randomly selected from a given range, like 2-4). Another thing I'm considering is adding a +/- to the trailer year -- for example, a value of 1 in this instance would pick trailers from 1978 (-1), 1979 (0), and 1980 (+1).
I haven't decided if the end product will be command line driven or be GUI based. If it's command line, I'll have a separate file with all the variables set there so that changing things like the number of trailers picked or the year variance are easily changed without going into the script itself.
I'm really posting this as a place to track the progress, and also to commit to writing it.
Admins: if this works better in a different sub, feel free to move it.
Here's an example of one of the "commercials" I found. There are hundreds of these online. Most of them are drive-in related ("let's all go to the loooooby..."). Snack Canyon:
EDIT: One other thing... there are more than just commercials and trailers -- for example, there are theater policy trailers and those "Dolby Digital" (or thx, or whatever) bumpers. So in theory all of those could be listed as separate categories and added to the list as such. That being said, the idea is to make it fun, not add 20 minutes to the beginning of each movie I watch.
Example Theater policy:
As construction continues on my shop/home theater, I'm preparing some of the other pieces. One idea I've had for a while is coming up a way to simulate the theater experience. I'm not talking about people talking and kicking the back of my chair throughout the film (maybe in version 2.0...) but instead what I want to do is generate short playlists based on the movie I plan to watch.
Here's the concept: before watching a film, I would run a script that would prepare a playlist. The playlist should include commercials/teasers for theaters, a random number of movie trailers, and then the movie. I want to build a lot of randomness into the script so that I am surprised by the results when I start the playlist.
To prepare for this, I have downloaded 50 or so theater/drive-in commercials, and nearly a thousand movie trailers. It's almost 2020, folks. Hard drive space is no longer a thing.
Here's a bit of pseudo code to explain what I'm thinking.
01. Run script, point script to movie. (ex: "Meatballs (1979).mkv")
02. Extract the year of the movie from the filename ("1979")
03. Randomly pick 1-3 commercials from /commercials
04. Randomly pick 2-4 movie trailers from the same year as the movie ("1979")
05. Generate an m3u playlist with: random commercials, random trailers, and the movie.
The idea being before I go out to the theater to watch Meatballs, I would run the script and it would generate the playlist. By the time I got to the movie theater, I would instead run the playlist and be treated to a few commercials, some random trailers, and then the movie. It's no fun if I build the playlist manually, because I'll know what the trailers are going to be. I think it'll be way more fun this way.
Here are the random variables I want to build in: number of commercials (randomly selected from a given range, like 1-3), and number of trailers to add (randomly selected from a given range, like 2-4). Another thing I'm considering is adding a +/- to the trailer year -- for example, a value of 1 in this instance would pick trailers from 1978 (-1), 1979 (0), and 1980 (+1).
I haven't decided if the end product will be command line driven or be GUI based. If it's command line, I'll have a separate file with all the variables set there so that changing things like the number of trailers picked or the year variance are easily changed without going into the script itself.
I'm really posting this as a place to track the progress, and also to commit to writing it.
Admins: if this works better in a different sub, feel free to move it.
Here's an example of one of the "commercials" I found. There are hundreds of these online. Most of them are drive-in related ("let's all go to the loooooby..."). Snack Canyon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYUKt2zfBlk
EDIT: One other thing... there are more than just commercials and trailers -- for example, there are theater policy trailers and those "Dolby Digital" (or thx, or whatever) bumpers. So in theory all of those could be listed as separate categories and added to the list as such. That being said, the idea is to make it fun, not add 20 minutes to the beginning of each movie I watch.
Example Theater policy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AHK4QOuzmY