The Plex media player takes advantage of the power of AI to detect the credits on movies, TV shows and personal libraries, letting you skip them with a single click.
- What’s happening? Plex, a cross-platform media player, has rolled out a handy new feature that enables you to skip credits at the end of movies and TV shows.
- Why care? Videos don’t need to be annotated with credit markers because the app leverages machine learning to figure that out, which is impressive.
- What to do? When you see a button, hit it to skip the credits!
How to skip credits on Plex
When watching a TV show or movie, hit the Skip Credits button that appears when the credits start rolling. Doing so will instantly take you to the end of the credits or the post-play screen (if the credits are at the end of the movie or episode).
The credit detection feature and the ability to skip the credits are available in the Plex apps for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Android, Windows, the web and other platforms.
The feature seems to be pretty well thought out. For example, credit detection also works for mid-credits or post-credits scenes typically found at the end of many Marvel superhero movies. So, with the click of a button, you can skip directly to mid-credits or post-credits scenes, too, which is excellent!
Aside from movies and TV shows, credit skipping is available for personal media collections and on Plex’s free streaming on-demand catalog, as per the Plex blog.
Credit detection for your personal library
“For personal media, the ability to detect credits requires a Plex Pass subscription for the admin account of the Plex Media Server, as well as for the client playing the movie or episode to allow skipping (when playing personal content from a Plex Media Server),” Plex explains. Plex Media Server version 1.31.0 or newer is also required.
You must use an Analyze feature to detect credits for the videos in your personal library as part of Plex’s nightly maintenance. To do so, open the Plex web app, go to Settings → Server → Library and set the Generate credits video markers option to either As a scheduled task or As a scheduled task and when media is added.
How Plex’s credit detection works
The company explained in a support document that credit detection is an AI-powered feature that considers many signals to detect when the credits are rolling.
“We’ve worked hard to tune a machine learning algorithm to make sense of several inputs (text detection, the presence of black frames, and a few other secret ingredients) to come up with a reliable set of markers when credits begin and end.”
This seemingly simple feature is a complex AI problem, Plex notes. The company warns that the feature may not work as expected under specific scenarios, but “those cases should be few and far between at this point.”
If you haven’t used Plex in a while, like in a year or so, you’re wholeheartedly recommended to change your password because Plex was hacked in August 2022.