In-Progress Cinema Mode: random trailer selection

[Suliamu 36]

6 hours ago, michaeltruncale said:

Also the Trailers it's showing are very low resolution, is there a way to force it to be Random, and force it to find at a minimum 1080p Trailers?

I'm doing it very differently than most people here.  
I use plugin "Vantage Point".  
It gives you the ability to setup a folder, and content that is put into this folder is randomly chosen and played before a movie or a show. You can chose it yourself.  
It works perfectly. If you have a trailer-collection in a separate folder, this is the perfect way to do it and get fully randomness.  

But here comes the next point: I found after more than 2 years that my audience actually doesn't like trailers. 
It's basically a little bit like market research.   
They don't like them at all. I was also surprised. But when observing my own habits when watching stuff, i am skipping them too.   
Doesn't matter if its chosen random, or if an algorithm choses it. My users are looking for ways to turn them off.  
So before jumping enthusiastically into this, i would maybe make first a test with your users if they actually want it. 

Next, I found out that little "Intros", also delivered by Vantage point, are functioning way better and people are not skipping them but enjoying them. 
I'll give you three examples in the attachements:

I wrote an FFMPEG-script which is doing all the stuff, fade in-fade-out, text-scrolling by its own, automatical counter in the corner and so on. 
From those "Intros" i made only one in a tenth gets skipped.  

 

[michaeltruncale 6]

18 hours ago, Suliamu said:

If you have a trailer-collection in a separate folder, this is the perfect way to do it and get fully randomness.  

So I just had a trailer before a movie last night that I hadn't seen before, I like the idea of random because then it's constantly introducing me to new movies that I maybe haven't seen, don't have in my collection, or is in my collection by have forgotten about. I'm not really wanting to maintain a folder and download Trailers, because then I'd have to spend time finding new trailers to add. The trailers how they are don't seem random, if I start a Disney animated movie i showed me back to back Disney trailers, if I played a shoot em up movie, it showed me two other shoot em up movies, if I started a horror it showed me trailers related in the same genre, would be great to just be purely random...

[Smitty018210 143]

24 minutes ago, michaeltruncale said:

So I just had a trailer before a movie last night that I hadn't seen before, I like the idea of random because then it's constantly introducing me to new movies that I maybe haven't seen, don't have in my collection, or is in my collection by have forgotten about. I'm not really wanting to maintain a folder and download Trailers, because then I'd have to spend time finding new trailers to add. The trailers how they are don't seem random, if I start a Disney animated movie i showed me back to back Disney trailers, if I played a shoot em up movie, it showed me two other shoot em up movies, if I started a horror it showed me trailers related in the same genre, would be great to just be purely random...

Right now trailers are not random in the stable release. That is what this topic is about. We were hoping to improve that. 

If you go back a few pages there is a new version of the Cinema Intros plug-in that Luke created that you can install to your server. (Emby.Server.CinemaMode.dll) 

Sadly right now it appears to work only with beta server installs. Not the stable.

So you would have to install the beta server. Either replacing your stable release or you can do what I am doing (for testing) and running as a separate install.  I'm running them on two different W11 Machines, but I do think you can run them on the same machine. Not sure how that is done though. 

Edited August 13, 2025 by Smitty018210