Use COM interface to find black/silent video?

[jhyler]

I have a situation I'd like to automate with VRD, but have been unsuccessful so far. What I want to do is with my cursor set to a particular point in the video, find the next black, silent frame. This is what the ad detective does, and I'd like to take advantage of it here, but I haven't been successful doing it through the COM interface.

What I thought I might be able to do is set the ad detective parameters, do a NavigationSeekToTime, and then programmatically run the ad detective for a few seconds at a time until the length of the scene list changes. Then I'd grab the new marker and stop the scan. But so far I've been unable to get that to work. Should this work, and I've just not been successful at it, or is this approach just a lost cause? Is there another approach within VRD you might know of, or do I need to wade into ffmpeg?

Thanks!

 

[Dan203]

The realtime ad scanner adds marks which you can detect via COM, but they are not instant. They are added via a secondary thread so there is a slight lag on when they are added. What you can do is set it to run only between the selection markers. Then you can set a start/end point, run it, wait for it to complete, then check for the marks.

Or you can do this with the new scanner, which will generate an XML file, and then parse the XML yourself. It's just a standard VRD project file, and pretty simple to parse.