Ability to step frame by frame through footage in history

[drulia]

I'm new to frigate, so maybe this was discussed, but I didn't find anything.

It would be great to have ability to step frame by frame in the review history video, sometimes it's only a frame or two that has captured details (plate number, face, etc.) and it's very hard to find it with only 1s increments. Have to export video and play on vlc to step through frames.

Also, it would be useful to have "Mark these items as reviewed" button at the top (at least on desktop), so that I wouldn't always need to scroll through all of videos to reach button. If I have people in the yard or some other action happening where I'm involved, I don't want to review what was captured and it's a bit slow to scroll on that page.

Using frigate 0.14 3'rd beta

[Mincka]

It was requested there but it will be more visible with your thread. I gave you a +1.

[Mincka]

Why it would not work?

because if I want to skip 3 seconds forward I have to hit the button 30 times, this sub second granularity can not reasonably satisfy every use case someone might have for wanting to skip forward < 10 seconds.

You can just keep pushing the key to go faster, it already works like that.
Except that's actually less useful with 1 second steps than 0.x steps since you reach the equivalent of the 10 second jump in 2 seconds.

In my original post, I suggested to add buttons in the toolbar to do precision seeking so could have the "frame" seeking with the buttons and don't change the 1 second stepping with up / down. You would have the benefit of both.

[cbw]

We have considered these things. Unfortunately this is not a well-supported solution in all browsers.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaElement/currentTime#usage_notes

If I'm interpreting this correctly, seeking +0.1/-0.1s would work across browsers?

For example, with reduced time precision, the result of video.currentTime will always be a multiple of 0.002, or a multiple of 0.1 (or privacy.resistFingerprinting.reduceTimerPrecision.microseconds) with privacy.resistFingerprinting enabled.

One potential and quite trivial implementation is to use the ctrl/meta modifier key alongside up/down. In VideoControls.tsx in the onKeyboardShortcut callback:

        case "ArrowDown":
          if (modifiers.ctrl) {
            onSeek(-0.1);
          } else {
            onSeek(-1);
          }
          break;
        case "ArrowUp":
          if (modifiers.ctrl) {
            onSeek(0.1);
          } else {
            onSeek(1);
          }
          break;

Created a PR with this suggested implementation for review.

[Mincka]

Very nice suggestion to use a modifier to make everyone happy.
May I ask why you put 1 / 30 in your PR? The code is not the same as above. Is it a mistake?

frigate/web/src/components/player/VideoControls.tsx

Line 162 in 054a576

onSeek(1 / 30);

[ofcedwards]

Created a PR with this suggested implementation for review.

I'm not sure how much more complex it would be to implement, but I prefer video players that have large skips (5+ seconds) while the video is playing and frame-by-frame while the video is paused. I'm assuming the intended use for your PR is with the video paused anyway. This would also allow for the feature to be used on mobile, where modifier keys aren't present. Overall, excellent idea.

[hawkeye217]

You're correct, mobile would not be supported with the code in that PR. As mentioned in the thread above, frame-by-frame is not possible in browsers.

We're looking at a more robust solution for precision and variable seeking that includes mobile support in a future version of Frigate.

[hawkeye217]

There have been many performance improvements since beta 3, including scrolling performance on the review page and the ability to select all review items with a keyboard shortcut. I’d recommend updating to beta 4.