Request: thumbnails as a measurement

English support for the software AllDup
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knaxx
Posts: 2
Joined: 11 Sep 2022, 00:01

Request: thumbnails as a measurement

Post by knaxx »

AllDup is great when it comes to pictures but have a harder time with small videofiles that is identical but who have different filesizes and small ms differences in duration.

One feature that would improve AllDups recognission of identical video files is to use the videos thumbnail as a measurement. If the thumbnails is the same then size and ms wouldn't matter.
therube
Posts: 322
Joined: 07 Nov 2012, 00:28

Re: Request: thumbnails as a measurement

Post by therube »

thumbnails as a measurement
Oh, so you're saying take (some arbitrary, some set time into the video, say at the 1.sec mark or whatever) "thumbnail" shot of the video & compare the thumbnails (rather then audio length, which is the current situation).

(And do note, that for "ms" diffs, & other reasons, that thumbnail may not necessarily be "identical"...)

(I'll note that from other softwares that work in a similar manner, results will vary...)

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If you wanted to search, based on Length, with say a 1 sec time variance, you can do that with Everything 1.5 Alpha.
(By default, Everything takes ms into account, but you can change that.)

You would add a (Property), Length: column - indexed or not (depending on your needs).
(If not indexed, it uses a lazy-load, so only when the column is brought into focus, does it load the Length data.)
Then right-click the Length column header, Find Length Duplicates.
That would find duplicated Length videos.

You can then drag said videos into your player ( mpv.net media player, a mpv front-end, works very well for that, retaining the sort order as listed in Everything), & use mpv.net to "preview" your clips...

Actually, Everything itself can also display video thumbnails, so that in & of itself may help you.
(Set the View, to Thumbnails.)

--

(I've never actually used AllDup 'Find video & audio files on the basis of the audio length' nor Everything's Thumbnails.)

And depending... on any number of factors, one tools, or combinations of tools, might or might not work "better" for particular data sets.
knaxx
Posts: 2
Joined: 11 Sep 2022, 00:01

Re: Request: thumbnails as a measurement

Post by knaxx »

No, what i say is Take the first frame that usually is presented as the thumbnail of the file in a filebrowser and use that as a stand in for the video when you do a comparison. If you take a frame from a random point in the video you could get lots of different images, even if the files are the same 99%.

To clarify, I had a case where there was about 300 video files, all between 10 and 15 sec long. Out of all these files there was only 18 originals. Alldup could only detect 1 or 2 because of small differences. The files would differ between 0.5 - 8mb and most were 15sec long.
Using size as a measure wouldn't work. And Length would list way to many false positives making it unusable.

To solve this it was easier to manually check on the first frame that was the thumbnail because in every single case it was exactly the same picture.
andymbody
Posts: 3
Joined: 23 Nov 2022, 23:01

Re: Request: thumbnails as a measurement

Post by andymbody »

Correct me if I'm wrong...

... but the thumbnail generated to represent a video file (in Windows) is usually generated by the frame found at approximately 25% into the video itself. At least that is what I find on my system. So on my system, the video thumbnail does not show the first frame, but instead the frame found at about 25% into the video. Not sure if this would be a positive or negative benefit to your suggestion. Or if you are actually talking about using the thumbnail generated by Windows itself.
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