[_frog]

That's a very cool idea, but its application seems limited to games with clear 'level' screens. Recently I've been watching speedruns of Ocarina of Time as well as Metroid Prime and neither of those have obvious indicators for most of the splits.

[b0b_d0e]

I agree that it would be more difficult for those kinds of games, but I think with a little bit of cleverness it can still be managed. Since it doesn't really matter where you split, but rather that you consistently split at the same spot, I think it can work by splitting on "You've got item!" text or other things like that. For instance, the first split of the Ocarina of Time escape could be split as soon as it displays part of the map for the zora river. The bottle split could be hit when you hold the bottle over your head, it could match part of the blue text box displayed over your hand since this exact spot on the screen would look the same for all N64 versions of the game. One of the key features of the auto split program would have to be that the image matching program wouldn't be so strict as to require pixel perfect matches, but also would be strict enough that it wouldn't pick up any false positives.