Plex Becomes Even More Like Netflix With It's New Skip Intro Feature

Plex has come a long way since the days of being a fork of XBMC, since then it has almost been a household name, going from not so well known to partner with Major companies like Tidal to easily bring lossless music to your Media Centre.

Lately, Plex has focussed on a redesign to unify all of its apps into one clean design, the progress has been going well so far, no longer will you have to re-learn where all of the menus are, going from an Xbox to a Smart TV.

Today Plex has something special for its Plexpass members, one of the most convenient features that Netflix users already enjoy, is the ability to skip the intro of a TV Show. This is especially helpful when binge-watching episodes of your favorite TV Show.

The Technology behind the new features seems simple but no doubt it would have taken a long time to perfect, Plex has created an audio fingerprint of the histogram of each episode in a season, from this it can make an educated guess when an intro is playing.

Your Plex Server will have to do this for each season of a TV show in your Plex TV Show library.

A little peek under the hood: The secret ingredient is creating an audio “fingerprint” out of the histogram of each episode in a given season of each > TV show. It turns out that the vast majority of show intros share common audio signatures for all their episodes (at least for a specific season). After applying some heuristics and a little bit of Special Sauce™, we’re able to predict (in almost all cases) precisely when the intro starts and > ends. Voila! Get precious minutes of your life back, one episode at a time.

The update is ready to try out, first, you’ll need to ensure that you have a Plexpass Membership, this can be paid for yearly, monthly, or with a lifetime membership.

What you'll need to get started...

-Turn the Setting on for Your Server

-You can enable whether or not your Plex Media Server will generate intro markers under the library settings for your server. To do so:

-Open Plex Web App

-Go to Settings > Server > Library

-Set the Generate intro video markers setting as desired