Show HN: Watch movies with the freedom to filter
github.com
github.com
We do that all the time. I don't let my kids watch some content because of their age. I filter their activities (don't let them drive until they're able). I try to filter what they eat (less junk food), and their waking hours (try to get them to go to bed). This is no different. It's all cost/benefit, and if some people think some content of any sort is not appropriate for them and their families, fine. But why not allow them the 95% of the content that they like? What if Netflix said you only got to watch a series if you guaranteed you'd watch every episode? The idea is preposterous.
The idea is preposterous.
We are talking about automated content filtering. This is all we are talking about. Not whether it's OK to stop watching a film you're not enjoying (of course it is), not 'rules in general' like driving regulations and bedtime. Just automated content filtering.
Without condoning or condemning Trump's speeches, skipping to just parts can radically change your impression of the man and his policies.
This is a problem journalism faces when covering events. They try to edit down to the meaningful parts while retaining the meaning of the whole. I can't imagine that filtering out certain triggering phrases/words would allow you paint a fair picture of him or his policies.
I do also think that these two examples are not the best examplse we could come up with. And in no way do they demonstrate why the complete project should be useless for every use case.
The only thing that they show (correctly, I have to say), is that there are some sources where filters and cuts can be harmful.
And, in addition to that, not only can content be filtered, but it is filtered for you all the time already. This is a chance to take the filtering away from the producers and choose what you want to see yourself. Don't let others decide. Because that is real censorship.
I'm sure some people may have different uses in mind but that's their business.
You're right it's other people's business, I'm not saying this kind of tool should be banned! I'm just voicing a concern that it might be unhealthy for people to set up automatic filters for stuff they find offensive, across all their film and TV. I think people should be offended sometimes. Not that anyone should try to offend people for the sake of it, but I think occasionally seeing stuff that challenges your sensibilities (in the context of good literature, ideally) probably helps people to be more tolerant and less reactionary.
And this has never been the intention or intended use case of this tool. So I guess we've figured out the misunderstanding.
It's fascinating to consider the cultural differences that make sex the thing most unacceptable in a movie largely concerned with gigantic flying death machines.
And I'm not saying jets are not awesomely cool, they are indeed... But is the movie significantly different from an air force/navy recruiting advertisement?
Social media already makes this far too easy.
For art, this can make a movie have a very different meaning. Violence and sexuality can be very critical to the message of a movie, and editing it to make it mean something else just feels disingenuous to the original art.
This is like people covering statues of naked people because they're uncomfortable around nudity.
Still, I think individuals have a right to do this, whether for themselves or for their kids. I just view it like people's right to smoke cigarettes or go tanning. This is an inherently dangerous approach to life.
This project doesn't try to create a huge filter bubble and introduce a dangerous approach to education and life.
No, it's just a simple utility to help you make some simple cuts so that you can enjoy the movie without watching the few scenes that were inserted for shock value.
> I'd rather not give any kind of support to those who demoralize women.
This is not what this tool is about.
Movies are filtered already. Not always, of course. But depending on where you watch them, they are. Stop others from censoring the movies for you. Get the full uncensored version and decide yourself what you want to see.
This is not more filtering, but less filtering, usually.
Yes, that was the intent, actually. It's also included in the repository's documentation. But I see that it has been poorly communicated.
There are quite a few (historic) films that I like very much. I'd love to show those to my younger sister or brother. But that one scene where somebody has their throat cut -- there's no way I can show that. But without that scene, it makes a great movie, even for younger audiences.
Moreover, your criticism states that skipping things is always bad. That's not true, of course. In practice, you can make good cuts and bad cuts. And to achieve good results, one has to make reasonable cuts that preserve all the important parts and don't hurt the film. If this is done, it can be a wonderful experience.
Moreover, your criticism states that skipping things is always bad.
You see, this is not the point of this project and has never been intended or supported in any way.
> I definitely never said that.
What about this?
> I know it seems very reasonable, inviting people to choose what they want to censor for themselves... but it just feels wrong. I'd much rather someone didn't watch my film at all than watch a butchered version. [...] Not a good attitude for life.
Edit: Also, it seems like the severity levels (low/medium/high) are arbitrary, meaning they will vary from film to film. It might make more sense to give categories sub-categories or tags. So for swear words, it would have the sub-categories of all the various words which might be used. For violence, it might have the tags of ('simulated', 'on screen', 'bloody'), etc. That way the viewer could decide what they want to see, and it would be somewhat consistent.
At present, the list of available categories and filters has been kept short to ensure simplicity.
We might think about allowing any custom categories, as you suggested. So we should definitely keep that idea in mind.
But let's assume you added "rape" as a category (which we thougth about as well): Then when do you add "rape" versus the existing "violence", "sex" or "nudity"? Do you have to add them all for most rape scenes? On the other hand, what do the consumers do? Do they have to tick dozens of boxes to ensure that no unwanted scenes are shown?
The more categories you add, the more blurred do the boundaries become.
"Violence" doesn't cover her specific use case, so without the ability to narrow that to "animal cruelty", it wouldn't address our own requirements.
I think that's kind of the point. There isn't a single coherent dependency for all cultures for all content.
To have a simplified single set is to place one (semi arbitrary) value system over another.
You could study the correlations and common concurrent uses, and maybe provide common suggestions, like Amazon does. But again, boundaries and weirdness.
Really an important point. Thanks!
This concept really doesn't work without standardized categories. Of course, you could argue that more granularity should be added to the categories, and I don't necessarily disagree. You could even have a directed graph of categories, so that (for instance) "rape" could be a descendant of both "violence" and "sex" and thus rape scenes would be banned if the user banned either violence or sex.
The only downside I could think of is that things could get a bit untransparent with such complex graphs. People could think: "Why did I miss this scene? I haven't even enabled that particular filter."
If misophonia is a possible useful application of custom categories, there might be many others.
So these small communities could really profit from such an open format, in case custom categories were added.
They will certainly not get this with the commercial providers of movie filtering.
Rape is sex without consent, big difference between that and violent (consensual) sex.
"rape" might also include some frat boys joking about rape, which might really upset a rape victim watching it.
We don't have to discuss this. Everybody should know this and agree.
But the point was that rape scenes often include sex or nudity. So if you tagged a scene 'rape', you would often have to add the other related tags as well. This is because somebody might have banned 'nudity' only.
The comment I was replying to, implied that you could just have violence+sex+nudity categories instead:
when do you add "rape" versus the existing "violence", "sex" or "nudity"?
1) Add a "product placement" category.
2) Add support for a custom mask instead of just blanking out video/audio. This way, I can see that the character is drinking a delicious soda, but I don't need to know the exact kind.
The three levels currently used are definitely not completely arbitrary. I'm sure we all can tell mild violence and really severe levels of violence apart. But I definitely see your point, nonetheless.
For "nudity", the different levels of "bare buttocks" versus "full (frontal) nudity" come to mind, for example. This caught be implemented in custom severity levels, of course.
But the major advantage of the three general levels is that the higher ones include the lower ones. That makes things as easy as choosing one severity level for each category.
If, for "nudity", you have the two levels suggested above (and potentially dozens of other levels), you have to provide a check box for every single level or "sub-category". That's far more complex, both from a consumer UX perspective and from the tagger experience.
The obvious drawback of that approach (shared with tags) is that the description needs to be in some language. This clearly hurts internationalization efforts.
nudity/low: bare buttocks
nudity/high: full (frontal) nudity
But this is harder (maybe even impossible) in other categories. What if somebody sees "throat cut" as a "high" level of violence and a killed animal as "low" level, while someone else sees it the other way round?
Edit: Some links here: https://www.reddit.com/r/breakingbad/comments/3jt531/does_an...
Similarly, I've been thinking about using a bunch of copyrighted music in a game I'm making... not by shipping the songs, but rather by just using the copies people may or may not have in their iTunes libraries, with fallbacks to non-copyright ambient music.
Remix culture is too focused on embedding. Everybody forgets about the possibility of transclusion.
I think the main hurdle would be actually doing the editing because of how time consuming it is. Perhaps the edit lists could be sold, and the after market editors could get paid.
I wouldn't want to get into the mess of distributing copyrighted content, so I was thinking of using the seek mechanism built into video players. A user would load original content and the edit list, and the player would handle seeking correctly.
In the naive implementation of this scenario, time would have to be very well synchronized between source materials. I'm not sure how much of a problem that would be. While writing this comment, the possibility of using image and sound recognition floated into my consciousness. Perhaps there would be a way to tag the images and sounds around cuts, to make them work even if time were off (e.g. commercial break ran longer in one time zone than another).
If you build it, I don't want my cut; I just want to know about it!
> I think the main hurdle would be actually doing the editing because of how time consuming it is. Perhaps the edit lists could be sold, and the after market editors could get paid.
That's exactly what was envisaged. This is just an open format. There could be (commercial) platforms or markets that offer complete filter lists. You don't have to do it yourself. Even more than that, you shouldn't do everything yourself. This can be a community effort, where you contribute only small parts.
> I wouldn't want to get into the mess of distributing copyrighted content, so I was thinking of using the seek mechanism built into video players.
This is what this project is about. You don't have to distribute source material. You have to distribute the filter lists only. The format can be "transpiled" to popular playlist formats that make use of the seek mechanisms.
> In the naive implementation of this scenario, time would have to be very well synchronized between source materials.
This is built-in. You may take a look at the converter/transpiler tool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit
Production companies often create airplane and television versions of movies, and it isn't any big deal. I see no reason why customization of this sort is immoral since no one is required to use it.
Mad Max Black & Chrome: https://blackandchrome.wordpress.com
Steven Soderbergh's "Psychos": http://extension765.com/sdr/15-psychos
(Plus multiple other recuts he's done: http://extension765.com/sdr )
Airplane versions are just another examples where such filtering is employed already and could benefit from an open format. Just like censored TV versions.
Custom edits are possible, and encouraged, as well.
And, as you said, nobody is required to use it. I really didn't expect these accusations of immorality. Those must be misunderstandings, because one can objectively say that this is not immoral in any way.
I suspect the "sex", like "nudity", is really for prudes who don't like seeing any hint of anything.
Rape is "violence" and not "sex" in this classification. But this should be documented, of course.
> This sounds like complete bullshit to me
I don't understand how you come to this point of view. You might personally not be interested in this. But that's not what you wrote. Anyway, as you can see in the README, there are several commercial providers for such filtering, so it's obvious that there are people who want and need this.
Just on the other side of this particular culture war I guess.
* surely plenty who want, but I disagree that anyone “needs”
(1) The community (or even you alone, or some (commercial) provider) tags the source material with categories and severities of things that can be filtered.
(2) Either in the UI of the video player (if supported), or using the currently provided "transpiler", you get to choose what you want to filter and what you want to see.
Sorry for having forgotten to explain this in a prominent place!
A work of art is an artist trying to tell you something. Chopping out bits based on your petty personal prejudices is like going through the Louvre and drawing clothes on all the nudes with a Sharpie. Even if you're the only one who ever has to see the defaced version -- and you can't tell me that your "freedom to filter" won't eventually start being forced down the throats of other people, like children in schools -- who gave you the right to make the decision on the artist's behalf that the defaced version doesn't compromise their work?
If you don't like art, you have always had the only freedom that matters, which is to choose not to look at it. You can live in your bubble and never risk offense if you want to; you just have to be willing to have the courage of your convictions and forgo the things you oppose. "Filtering" is just a way to try and have it both ways, to have your cake and eat it too. It's every bit as venal and cowardly today as it was when Thomas Bowdler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler) was doing it in the 19th century.
Art is what it is. If you don't like it, don't pollute it by trying to "fix" it; leave it alone and maybe try making some of your own that meets your standards.
Like that meal at the restaurant? You better damned finish it all or the chef would rather you not eat any!
What do you feel you gain by excising the objectionable portions of a work?
I think the categories chosen are those that the MPAA use to set the content rating.
Regarding the composition of the category list: "specific"? -- probably, "weird" -- not at all.
The initial selection of categories has been inspired by other providers and rating systems. Further, they are broad and general categories that encompass a lot of other topics such as those you suggested. Yet again, something like "gambling" on the list might make this seem "weirdly specific".
But when re-structing the current category list, one should certainly add your suggestions. Either as top categories or sub categories that could be introduced instead of severity levels.
This is exactly what the vision (or a large part of it) was. But having phrased the title as you suggested, people would have countered that the best way "NOT to filter" is to play back the material as-is.
I've created several filters for personal use with EDL. mplayer has a decent UI way of doing that while watching the film by pressing 'i' to start a cut and 'i' again to end the cut. It's nowhere near perfect though because you still have to edit the edl file to decide whether to cut video or mute audio.
One nice feature you could add to this editing UI would be to use the subtitle file to allow jumping to the locations of certain language in order to edit them (times in subtitles aren't enough to edit a single word).
So this is the very beginning, and since nobody even knew of it until yesterday, manually editing the lists was fine with me.
By the way, the textual filter lists are easy to write and edit :)
You could pull it off pretty easily by running the audio track through speech recognition—not for content, just for detecting speech is happening—and then snipping out an overlapping fat-margined timeslice of the video around each instance of dialogue.
I imagine episodes would be 10 minutes long and you'd have no idea what's happening. Not saying they don't go over the top at times, but the brutality of a show like GoT is a very powerful illustration tool, and filtering out bits and pieces because they make you uncomfortable would ruin the entire purpose of the show.
I'm sure some people will find use for this tool, but I will likely forgo.
Regardless, the end effect on the viewers (both willing and unwilling) is that they have not seen the work. They may in fact have a completely different understanding of the film or show than someone who actually has seen the work. A morally ambiguous character becomes wholly righteous. A villain becomes the hero. Violent acts cease to have a consequence of gore, perhaps of pain or death. Romance no longer leads to sex. Dialogue cut for swearing completely changes the perception of a character, the story, and the world.
In the end you have seen something worse than nothing at all--a cartoon caricature of what the creators intended. You have wasted your own time, perverted the aims of the artists behind the work, and done your children a disservice.
Somebody is always the one who shapes what you (or your children) see. If you watch uncensored movies, it's (mainly) the director who decides. If you apply some selected filters, it's you who decides and shapes the movie. This is not inherently bad. And not all scenes contribute to the development of characters and story. Some are just for shock value, etc.
The README tries to explain a lot of the things, but I can answer questions here, of course, and give an overview.
All in all, the idea is quite simple and the project doesn't really do that much, yet.
As an alternative to commercial providers for content filters, family filters, etc., this project tries to establish an open format that can be used to describe any video source. The filters are split into several categories where each has "severity" level.
This way, you can adjust the filters to your personal needs and wishes when using them. Example: You are terribly frightened by fire because you have some childhood trauma. But you don't care about violence and blood splatters at all. For me, this might be the other way round. So if we can adjust the filters to our needs, they can be useful to both of us.
Since nobody supports this format today (nobody even knew of it until today), a web tool is provided that lets you "transpile" the filters to three popular playlist formats.
* XSPF for VLC media player
* M3U for VLC media player
* EDL for MPlayer
And yes, they do support seamless plaback based on start/stop times.
Your comment is incoherent.
This website is a tool for people to use for themselves to decide if they want to see a movie or not. How do they know if they don't like the content in a movie? this site will tell them.
If we have a censored version of Huckleberry Fin and a non-censored version, you could say I have a choice of which to read but it is still censorship and we still live in a world where books are censored.
And, in consequence, reducing the level of censorship that is forced upon you without your consent.
Many people disagree but I don't like giving groups like the MPAA the unfettered ability to label what's good and bad.
Only if the filters are accurate. Which is impossible since severity will differ from person to person. Eventually someone will have to make the calls on what gets cut and if so, at what severity. At which point individuals are trusting someone else to "censor properly".
For this to work with a large community - severity needs a strict definition. An example as to why:
Nemo's mother's implied death in Finding Nemo { Category: Death, Severity: High }
Inappropriate/misogynistic humor in Finding Nemo (every single scene with Doroth in particular) { Category: Langage, Severity: High }
Shark chase scene in Finding Nemo { Category: Violence, Severity: High }
I'm sure I could find some more problematic scenes in Finding Nemo. There are enough scenes to remove to turn it from PG to G, and honestly "lower than G" if that were even such a thing.
And since the severity is "high" it would be censored uniformly across all thresholds, making the different thresholds meaningless.
Who gets to judge that that is an "extreme" example? I'm a fragile person and found those scenes extremely frightening. Are they going to tell me I'm wrong? Who are they to judge my emotions? If I'm going to be subject to such violence even with the setting on the highest it will go then it is completely useless to me and others who are easily triggered if we are still going to have to watch graphic scenes.
I want to see a reasonable argument against that which doesn't involve doublethink. If it involves setting strict standards for how ratings are judged - that's the exact flaw I was pointing out.
This may not be clear enough in the description. Sorry!
If I choose to skip a chapter in a book I'm reading because I'm not interested in that chapter you wouldn't call that censorship.
BTW, this has already caught on as the service http://clearplay.com/ seems to be doing well.
And now we have a tool to do just that. But even better we can choose not to watch just the bits we don't want to.
That means I'll be able to set the toddlers off watching Star Wars without having to spring into action at minute seventeen to fast forward past the smouldering corpses of Luke's aunt and uncle.
Apologies for the damage this caused you.
Regarding "freedom" as used in the context of this project. Yes, in some scenarios I may have the freedom not to use this filter but it could easily be abused. I can see this system being used to censor films in schools or at public events where the viewers don't have a choice. Furthermore, the artists creating movies are not provided the freedom to opt out of this labeling system. It is applied potentially against their will.