needle

Crates.io

A tool that finds a needle (opening/intro and ending/credits) in a haystack (TV or anime episode).

Demo

asciicast

Quickstart

First, install needle:

cargo install needle-rs

Run a search for opening and endings in the first three episodes of Land of the Lustrous:

``` $ needle search --analyze --no-skip-files ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

Run the same search as above, but write the results to JSON alongside each video (called "skip files"):

``` $ needle search --analyze --no-display ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

$ cat ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.needle.skip.json {"ending":[1332.3355712890625,1422.276611328125],"opening":null} ```

Overview

needle has two subcommands: 1) analyze and 2) search.

You may have noticed that we only used the search subcommand in the examples above. You also likely noticed that it takes quite a bit to of time to spit out results. Well, it turns out that decoding and resampling audio streams takes way longer than searching for openings and endings.

That's where the analyze command comes in. Using this subcommand, you can pre-compute the required data and store it alongside video files (just like with skip files). The pre-computed data is stored in a compact binary format and is much smaller in size than the audio stream.

Let's try it out with the same files as above:

``` $ needle analyze ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

$ ls -la ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-*.needle.bin -rw-r--r-- 1 aksiksi staff 76128 Jul 2 20:09 ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.needle.bin -rw-r--r-- 1 aksiksi staff 76128 Jul 2 20:09 ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.needle.bin -rw-r--r-- 1 aksiksi staff 76128 Jul 2 20:09 ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.needle.bin ```

As you can see, the files are quite small: on the order of 76 KB for ~20 minutes of audio. Note that this size can change based on how you configure the analyzer.

Once we have these pre-computed files, we can re-run the search step, but this time we will omit the --analyze flag:

``` $ needle search ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

On my machine (M1 Macbook Pro), the analyze step takes 10 seconds, while the search using pre-computed data takes less than 1 second.

Let's try running analyze and search for Season 4 of Attack on Titan (yes, you can specify directories!):

``` $ time needle analyze "~/Movies/Season 4" needle analyze "~/Movies/Season 4" 97.08s user 6.29s system 725% cpu 14.242 total

$ time needle search "~/Movies/Season 4" needle search "~/Movies/Season 4" 112.07s user 16.01s system 810% cpu 15.802 total ```

Ah, so now the search step takes slightly longer than the analyze step! The reason is that the search step scales quadratically with the number of videos - each pair of videos needs to be checked separately. Ideally, you should only be running against an entire season once and then performing incremental searches for newly added videos, which is why skip files are important.

Configuration

TODO

Build

Linux

  1. Install the FFmpeg and chromaprint dev libraries:

sudo apt install \ libchromaprint-dev \ libavutil-dev \ libavformat-dev \ libswresample-dev \ libavcodec-dev \ libavfilter-dev \ libavdevice-dev

  1. Run cargo build

macOS

  1. Install FFmpeg and chromaprint:

brew install ffmpeg chromaprint

  1. Run cargo build

Windows

  1. Install cargo-vcpkg:

cargo install cargo-vcpkg

  1. Install vcpkg deps:

cargo vcpkg build

  1. Add additional libs to rustcflags:

```toml

~/.cargo/config.toml

[target.x86_64-pc-windows-msvc]

FFmpeg static build

rustflags = [ "-C", "link-arg=strmiids.lib", "-C", "link-arg=mf.lib", "-C", "link-arg=mfplat.lib", "-C", "link-arg=mfplay.lib", "-C", "link-arg=mfreadwrite.lib", "-C", "link-arg=mfuuid.lib", "-C", "link-arg=dxva2.lib", "-C", "link-arg=evr.lib", "-C", "link-arg=vfw32.lib", "-C", "link-arg=shlwapi.lib", "-C", "link-arg=oleaut32.lib" ] ```

  1. Build:

cargo build --features static

Note: The steps above assume a static build.