to be no way to determine whether a Youtube clip is a “still image” thing or a real moving clip. Lots of people just show a still image of an album cover and put some music on top.
That’s really boring to look at.
So I wondered whether there’s an easy way I could filter out still images. I could download them before playing, and check whether they’re “big enough” to seem to be movies, but some clips are so long that that’s not practical. I could alter mplayer to monitor the video bit rate… or I could just dump the USB bus and see whether there’s anything transferred to the USB screen.
It turns out that most “still image” clips still output a bit of video data on the USB bus (probably due to Youtube post-processing or something), but it seems to be at least a factor of 100 difference, so it should be no problem to use, I think.
I just have to hook this up to the flutter script and maintain a blacklist of Youtube clips not to display.
I should patent this revolutionary technology and license it to Google! Then they could offer filtering! Yeah! That’s the ticket.
