Only cases that come to my mind have episode recaps between opening credits and episode plot, so there is no reason to exclude them from the total runtime. But even if the recap is before the opening credits I would incline to include it, maybe except for the cases where the recap is not included in the episode provided via VOD, physical release and the like. Do you have any particular case in mind?

Sure, I want to fix the runtime of "the walking dead", I have the episodes of the 4th season on my PC in HDTV version (so with AMC logo in down right corner). The standard of this AMC's show is that all the episodes have an initial recap of the previous ones, then some scenes before the opening theme (theme, not credits), then the rest of the episode till the end and final credits. (Other credits are put in the initial scenes after the opening theme).

On the other hand, the bluray version has not the usual initial recap.

I didn't see the series (we only watch TV shows with kids, who are a bit young for this), but by quickly checking S04E07, which is 42m 58s long, there is no episode recap, but a 4m 52s long pre-credits scene with a girl playng chess and some other guys, which should be definitely taken in the account when deciding episode length (assuming that the S04E07 I checked is the original version of the episode).

Also, please keep in mind, that as per our Bible, runtime is always rounded up, so episode long 43m 1s, should be added with runtime 44 minutes.

Edit: Assuming that we are talking about the case where the episode recap is aired at the episode start, but doesn't appear in any subsequent episode release (VOD, Blu-Ray), I asked for the advice other mods on mod forum.

I read the Bible about runtime, but among many rules I accepted, that one on runtime I don't completely agree.

For example if an episode is 24:29 and another 24:31, the total runtime is 49 minutes.

If I rounded the first one to 24 and the second one to 25, I get the right value of 49 minutes, but if I rounded both to 25, I get 50 minutes total, that is not true.

If you only round up, you'll have a total runtime of all viewed episodes always bigger, but if you round up (from 31 to 59 seconds) or round down (from 00 to 29) the total seconds are more balanced between the episodes and the total runtime will be nearest to the real value.

@idro said:

For example if an episode is 24:29 and another 24:31, the total runtime is 49 minutes.

If you have only exactly 24 minutes available, you will not be able to completely view the 24:29 episodes. Consequently, it is needed to always round the duration up.

@superboy97 said:

@idro said:

For example if an episode is 24:29 and another 24:31, the total runtime is 49 minutes.

If you have only exactly 24 minutes available, you will not be able to completely view the 24:29 episodes. Consequently, it is needed to always round the duration up.

I don't understand, but anyway I try to do it looking for another explanation: if the runtime is 24:29 (or 24:03 or 24:05) this means that the minute 25 is started yet (even if it is not completed) and so it might as well round up rather than round down?

Can I ask you another thing? Why in my lists I created into my profile, the total runtime is stucked to 0H0M? Shouldn't it update every time I add a new show in the lists?

@idro said:

@superboy97 said:

@idro said:

For example if an episode is 24:29 and another 24:31, the total runtime is 49 minutes.

If you have only exactly 24 minutes available, you will not be able to completely view the 24:29 episodes. Consequently, it is needed to always round the duration up.

I don't understand, but anyway I try to do it looking for another explanation: if the runtime is 24:29 (or 24:03 or 24:05) this means that the minute 25 is started yet (even if it is not completed) and so it might as well round up rather than round down?

The runtime of an episode is the time you need to be able to view the complete episode. As indicated, you can't view an episode of 24:01 or 24:29 in exactly 24 minutes.

Can I ask you another thing? Why in my lists I created into my profile, the total runtime is stucked to 0H0M? Shouldn't it update every time I add a new show in the lists?

I don't use lists. So, I can't help you on them.

Ok, thank you.

Last thing: could you advise me some tool to make the screenshot for episodes tv series to insert on TMDB? I need expecially for italian series.

could you advise me some tool to make the screenshot

I'm using Greenshot to build a library of Czech and Slovak movie and TV show on-screen credits (100k images so far). You can set it to use custom keyboard shortcuts, capture precisely preselected screen region and save screencap to a file with custom naming convention, format and compression, which is all I need.

If you're going to contribute your own episode screencaps, you should read our guidelines here and in particular keep in mind that we don't allow any additional texts and logos (TV logos, subtitles...) and black bars around image. Also, the screencap should be made from original TV resolution (e.g. content originally made in PAL (720x576 pixels) mustn't be scaled up to screen resolution (e.g. 1920x1080)). Any decent video player (VLC) allows you to show video in a window with original 1:1 non-scaled image.

I would also recomend to pause video before taking screencap to make sure that the captured video frame is good (with no motion blur, interpolation artifacts and so on). For example above-mentioned VLC player allows you to play video frame-by-frame by pressing E key. Btw. another useful feature of VLC player is ability to save an unscaled videoframe to png file by pressing Shift+S instead of taking screenshot. You can't set a custom filename though, so things can get messy quickly.

If you're going to capture screencaps from video files, you can also use avidemux video editor, which will let you go through video keyframes (by pressing UP and DOWN keys) and save acual (key)frame as unscaled image (Ctrl+P). (Keyframes are least compressed frames from videostream.) This is quite slow method, though.

Finally, TMDB lets you to upload only jpeg files, while your screencap application will most likely produce png files. If you're going to convert png to jpeg I stronly recommend you to set jpeg compression at least to 90 (0.9) and sub sampling factor to 1x1 (if available). (The same applies to jpeg compression settings used by screencap application, should you chose to save screencaps directly as jpeg files.)