needle

A tool that finds a needle (opening/intro and ending/credits) in a haystack (TV or anime episode).

Demo

Quickstart

1. Install dependencies for your platform (if any)
2. Download the latest needle binary for your platform from the releases page

Run a search for opening and endings in the first three episodes of Land of the Lustrous:

$ needle search --analyze --no-skip-files ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv

* Opening - "00:43s"-"02:12s"
* Ending - "22:10s"-"23:56s"

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv

* Opening - N/A
* Ending - "22:10s"-"23:39s"

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

* Opening - "00:40s"-"02:08s"
* Ending - "22:09s"-"23:56s"

Run the same search as above, but write the results to JSON alongside each video (called "skip files"):

$ needle search --analyze --no-display ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

$ cat ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.needle.skip.json
{"ending":[1332.3355712890625,1422.276611328125],"opening":null}

Overview

needle has two subcommands: 1) analyze and 2) search.

You may have noticed that we only used the search subcommand in the examples above. You also likely noticed that it takes quite a bit to of time to spit out results. Well, it turns out that decoding and resampling audio streams takes way longer than searching for openings and endings.

That's where the analyze command comes in. Using this subcommand, you can pre-compute the required data and store it alongside video files (just like with skip files). The pre-computed data is stored in a compact binary format and is much smaller in size than the audio stream.

Let's try it out with the same files as above:

$ needle analyze ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

$ ls -la ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-*.needle.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 aksiksi  staff  76128 Jul  2 20:09 ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.needle.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 aksiksi  staff  76128 Jul  2 20:09 ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.needle.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 aksiksi  staff  76128 Jul  2 20:09 ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.needle.bin

As you can see, the files are quite small: on the order of 76 KB for ~20 minutes of audio. Note that this size can change based on how you configure the analyzer.

Once we have these pre-computed files, we can re-run the search step, but this time we will omit the --analyze flag:

$ needle search ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv ~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep2.mkv

* Opening - "00:43s"-"02:12s"
* Ending - "22:10s"-"23:56s"

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep1.mkv

* Opening - N/A
* Ending - "22:10s"-"23:39s"

~/Movies/land-of-lustrous-ep3.mkv

* Opening - "00:40s"-"02:08s"
* Ending - "22:09s"-"23:56s"

On my machine (M1 Macbook Pro), the analyze step takes 10 seconds, while the search using pre-computed data takes less than 1 second.

Let's try running analyze and search for Season 4 of Attack on Titan (yes, you can specify directories!):

$ time needle analyze "~/Movies/Season 4"
needle analyze "~/Movies/Season 4" 97.08s user 6.29s system 725% cpu 14.242 total

$ time needle search "~/Movies/Season 4"
needle search "~/Movies/Season 4" 112.07s user 16.01s system 810% cpu 15.802 total

Ah, so now the search step takes slightly longer than the analyze step! The reason is that the search step scales quadratically with the number of videos - each pair of videos needs to be checked separately. Ideally, you should only be running against an entire season once and then performing incremental searches for newly added videos, which is why skip files are important.

Configuration

TODO

Install

There are currently two ways to install needle:

1. Grab the latest binary from the releases page
   • Prerequisites: Install runtime dependencies for your platform
2. cargo install needle-rs
   • Prerequisites: Install build dependencies for your platform

Dependencies

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

Download the FFmpeg libraries:

sudo apt install \
    libavutil56 \
    libavformat58 \
    libswresample3 \
    libavcodec58

macOS

Install FFmpeg and libraries:

brew install ffmpeg

Build

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

1. Install cmake, FFmpeg libraries, and fftw3 (optional, but recommended):

sudo apt install \
    pkg-config \
    cmake \
    libfftw3-dev \
    libavutil-dev \
    libavformat-dev \
    libswresample-dev \
    libavcodec-dev

2. Build:

cargo install --path .

This will dynamically link against FFmpeg and statically link chromaprint.

Dynamic

Install libraries:

sudo apt install \
    pkg-config \
    libchromaprint-dev \
    libavutil-dev \
    libavformat-dev \
    libswresample-dev \
    libavcodec-dev

Build:

CHROMAPRINT_SYS_DYNAMIC=1 cargo install --path .

macOS

1. Install cmake and FFmpeg:

brew install cmake pkg-config ffmpeg

2. Build:

cargo install --path .

This will dynamically link against FFmpeg. chromaprint will be statically linked.

Windows

1. Install cargo-vcpkg:

cargo install cargo-vcpkg

2. Install vcpkg deps:

cargo vcpkg build

3. Build:

# Statically link against both FFmpeg and chromaprint
cargo build --release --features static

Dynamic

1. Set the following environment variables:

   a. To dynamically link both FFmpeg and chromaprint:

   # Powershell
   $env:VCPKGRS_DYNAMIC='1'
   $env:VCPKGRS_TRIPLET='x64-windows'
   

   # Git bash
   export VCPKGRS_DYNAMIC=1
   export VCPKGRS_TRIPLET='x64-windows'
   

   b. Just chromaprint:

   # Powershell
   $env:CHROMAPRINT_SYS_DYNAMIC='1'
   

   # Git bash
   export CHROMAPRINT_SYS_DYNAMIC=1
   

2. Build deps:

cargo vcpkg build

3. Build needle:

cargo build --release

License

This work is dual-licensed under MIT and LGPL 2.1 (or later).

If you choose to statically link FFmpeg, this is licensed as LGPL 2.1 (or later) due to FFmpeg. Otherwise, you can use the MIT license.

SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT OR LGPL-2.1-or-later