Show HN: SpotifyTelevision – easily watch music videos for Spotify playlists | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SpotifyTelevision – easily watch music videos for Spotify playlists

immannino.github.io

27 pointsimmannino19 comments

Wish this could filter to videos that actually are music videos instead of just audio track + album cover. Perhaps it would be possible to make an educated guess by looking at the video file size. As it stands, less than 10% of my tracks actually end up displaying a proper video.

So I’ve actually been trying to brainstorm this for awhile. It’s really tough because I can’t programmatically validate the videos. Right now I was thinking of some kind of caching to keep a fire base of the correct music videos, and then having a pop up for the user to give feedback on whether or not the video I displayed for them is a music video or just music+album cover, and then have them be able to link the correct music video or submit a ticket and I could manually update that video in a database. Not 100% sure yet but I’m working on it

I had a similar problem previously and considered automating it by comparing frames. It's not easy and would have obvious false positives/negatives, but YouTube does help by publishing key frames and it could at least be used to help rank results.

Take this example music video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vopR3ys8Kw

Frames:

https://img.youtube.com/vi/6vopR3ys8Kw/0.jpg

https://img.youtube.com/vi/6vopR3ys8Kw/1.jpg

https://img.youtube.com/vi/6vopR3ys8Kw/2.jpg

https://img.youtube.com/vi/6vopR3ys8Kw/3.jpg

And this lyrics video version (more interesting because it's SOMEWHAT changing):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoAqHxm5dpo

Frames:

https://img.youtube.com/vi/FoAqHxm5dpo/0.jpg

https://img.youtube.com/vi/FoAqHxm5dpo/1.jpg

https://img.youtube.com/vi/FoAqHxm5dpo/2.jpg

https://img.youtube.com/vi/FoAqHxm5dpo/3.jpg

Simply finding the differences between frames would give the first video a higher score than the second.

I commented on your parent post before reading this...

Nice catch on the thumbnails that YouTube already captures. A histogram comparison between the second and third auto-generated thumbnails from the lyrics video was mostly equivalent when I ran one. That would be a good sign that it's not the actual music video.

What about snapping a few frames—maybe 33%, 50% and 66% of the way into the video—and doing a simple face detection?

Perhaps, on top of that, a histogram comparison of the same frames, which should capture if the video is pretty much lyrics on a static background.

1. It's not like all (or even most) music videos have faces in them.

2. I'm pretty sure it's not trivial to download just three specific frames of a video. And downloading so many videos would probably be expensive/bannable.

Really cool! I've been wondering why Spotify hasn't been showing music videos themselves on their app

Licensing.

They have started to. Some curated playlists even have exclusive music videos.

Cool! I've been working on something very similar: https://www.laidbackvj.com/ and it's open source: https://github.com/khaliqgant/laid-back-vj. Interesting to see a different interpretation of something I've been working on for a bit.

Oh that’s pretty sick! I just checked it out on my phone, I’ll look at it when I get home on my computer. Checkout the source code for mine too, maybe we could collaborate on something bigger!

Minor nitpicking: Text inside your buttons isn't vertically centered... kind of annoying ---to me, anyway.

Haha I appreciate the feedback! I’ll look into it when I get home and create an issue and fix it

Can I see how it works before signing in?

Yes, please. There's not even a written description of what this does.

Does it get the videos from YouTube?

Yup! I’m using the YouTube search api!

I can create a video for you when I get home, I’ve been out and about all day! I completely understand your reservations

Anyone have a video of what this does? I don't want to register, I want to just use it.

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