Analyze a film you own — without uploading it.
The analyzer at parentfilter.app/analyze reads a movie file that’s already on your computer, finds the moments a family might want filtered, and plays the film back with those moments skipped or blurred — live, in the page. Here is exactly what it does, and exactly what it can’t.
What actually happens
Your film stays on your machine. The page opens the file locally, the way a video player would — it is never uploaded, copied, or stored by us. What leaves your computer is a series of small still frames (one every couple of seconds, shrunk to 512 pixels wide), sent for analysis only after you’ve ticked a box saying so. The analysis looks at each still and flags violence, sex & nudity — including immodest dress by your family’s own written standard — and frightening imagery.
The flags come back as timestamps, and the page merges them into a small filter file: timestamps, categories, and one-line labels. That file is the entire output. During playback the filters steer the player — skip past a scene, blur the screen — and a notice tells everyone watching that the performance is altered. No edited copy of the movie is ever created, here or anywhere.
The honest limits
- Only files your browser can decode. Browsers play fewer formats than dedicated video apps. MP4/H.264 works everywhere; many MKV and HEVC files won’t open, and the page will tell you rather than pretend. The ParentFilter free desktop player reads more formats.
- Language needs a subtitle file. Spoken profanity
can’t be seen in a still frame, so the page reads the words instead — from
a
.srtor.vttfile you point it at, usually the sidecar file that sits next to the movie. That scan runs entirely on your computer against a fixed word list: nothing is uploaded, nothing is charged, and it works even if you filter nothing else. Without such a file there is no language filtering here, and the page says so rather than leaving the category quietly blank. Two things it can’t do: read subtitles embedded inside the movie file, and transcribe the audio — the local app adds optional on-device speech recognition for that. - Streaming subtitles are off limits, permanently. The captions inside a Netflix, Disney+ or Prime stream live inside the protected stream itself, and taking them out is circumventing that protection. We will never build it, in the extension or anywhere else. Language timestamps for a streamed film come from the shared library instead — contributed by a household that scanned its own copy, or a language guide (words only) we built from a subtitle file of the film’s dialogue — which is why sharing a filter you built is worth doing.
- Substance use isn’t screened either. The frame analysis covers violence, sex & nudity, and frightening scenes — the page says so where you choose filters, so an unchecked category is never mistaken for a clean one.
- Sampling, not omniscience. Frames are sampled every 2.5 seconds. A flash briefer than the gap can slip between samples, and the AI can misjudge a frame in either direction. Every result is labeled AI-generated; preview anything you’re unsure of.
- It takes a while. Your own computer does the reading — that is the price of the film never leaving it. A feature film is typically a 10–30 minute wait, and the tab has to stay open.
- DRM-free files only. Discs and downloads with copy protection can’t be read, and we will never build anything that circumvents it. Streaming services are a different surface — that’s what the browser extension is for.
What it costs
The analyzer is part of a ParentFilter subscription, because each analysis costs us real money to run. A free account covers the report cards and film ratings. Each subscription includes a monthly amount of analysis that covers a normal family’s movie nights; the page tells you plainly if you reach it.
Plainly stated
ParentFilter never creates an altered copy of any movie. Filtering happens during playback, at your direction, on content your family already has — the approach designed around the Family Movie Act of 2005. Every AI-generated result is labeled as such and may contain errors. Filtered playback always announces that the performance is altered from the version intended by the director or copyright holder.