Who’s on screen
Pause a film or an episode and X-ray says who is in the scene: the people on screen, the part each plays, how long they are in the title, and a jump to their next scene.
What you see
- On pause
- A strip of the faces in the shot, each with the actor’s name and the part.
- In scene
- A tab in X-ray with everyone in the current scene, even when their face is turned away.
- Title page
- The cast with their time on screen and the scenes they are in.
- Who’s this?
- Someone seen often who could not be named. Tap, choose the name, and that face is known in every title from then on.
Until a title has been through the pass, X-ray shows the cast list as before.
How it works
Your server looks at a few hundred keyframes of the title, finds the faces facing the camera, groups them into the title’s people and names each person against the title’s credited cast, using the faces pack: one face print for each of 82,898 actors, made from their public Wikimedia Commons portraits. Where the subtitles tag speakers, voices help too.
Tip A person it is not sure of stays unnamed. A wrong name on pause is worse than none.
Each actor it names clearly keeps this library’s face of them as a reference, so the next film of theirs is matched against a face from your own collection, whatever their age in it.
Turn it on
Choose the faces pack
The setup asks “Name who is on screen?”. Later: Server › Packs › Who is on screen, choose
faces-1(12 MB, downloads once).Pick when each library does it
Server › Libraries › (a library) › Background work › Who is on screen: when a title is first played (the default), as titles are added, in the background window, or never.
A viewer never sets anything. With the default, names arrive a few minutes into the first viewing.
What it costs
About half a CPU-minute per hour of film and 160 MB of memory while it runs. What it keeps is about a kilobyte an hour: who is on screen from when to when. No face picture, no voice and no crop is stored, and nothing leaves your server.
When it names nobody
A title with no credited cast, actors with no public portrait, faces too small or too dark, or a cast credited under other names. The cast list stays, and you can still name anyone shown as “Who’s this?”.
Something missing or wrong here? Tell us.