Plex's latest feature lets you skip movie and TV show credits

Plex now has the capability to skip intros and credits, so you don't have to sit through them if you don't want to. The streaming media service has introduced its new "Skip Credits" feature, a couple of years after a similar feature debuted for intros, and it shows up as a button at the bottom right corner of the screen. It appears the moment credits start rolling, allowing you to play the next episode in a series or to automatically jump to a mid- or post-credit scene in a movie with a single click.

This new credit detection feature is available throughout Plex's entire free streaming catalogue, giving it a viewing experience similar to Netflix's in that regard. But you can also enable it for your personal collection, so long as you have Plex Pass subscription, which will set you back $5 a month or $40 a year. The company said it developed its own Skip Credits technology by training a machine learning algorithm to be able to detect markers like text and dark frames. It admits that the feature might still have a few hiccups and might not work as intended all the time, but it said those cases "should be few and far between."

If you want to enable Skip Credits for your collection, you'll need to have the latest Plex Media Server and perform "Analyze" on your whole library. Plex will then analyze your collection, say as a scheduled task and whenever new media is added, in order to identify when credits begin in your shows and movies. Since analyzing users' libraries to detect end credits use a lot of processing power - and "all that processing isn't cheap," the company said - Plex built a cloud-based repository where it will store users' results. It will allow you to get back your results in seconds if you need to do a clean install or to rebuild your whole library.