Flaggin particular parts of avi videos

January 18, 2005 4:47 AM

Is there any way to bookmark or flag a particular point in a video file (avi specifically, but any other format is good) and then to be able to have the video start at that point automatically when opened?
posted by humuhumu to computers & internet (5 answers total)

You might wanna look at smil, the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. You can build yourself a quick xml file, feed it to Real Player, and go from there. I believe the same thing works with windows media, but I've not tried it.
posted by ph00dz at 4:54 AM on January 18, 2005

That's fab, ph00dz, thanks. A few lines of XML was all it needed. Real Player wasb the default for smil files and worked like a charm. Media Player barfed. Winamp wouldn't play ball at all.
posted by humuhumu at 5:41 AM on January 18, 2005

Quicktime also supports SMIL, and with the proper codecs installed on the system will also support most AVIs. (Mac specific on the codecs link, but the concept is true on Windows based systems as well.)
posted by Animus at 7:38 AM on January 18, 2005

Also note that with RealPlayer you can specify a start time in the URL:

rtsp://www.pathtorealfile.com/filename.rm?start="20.0"

This would start the clip 20 seconds in.
posted by filmgoerjuan at 2:18 PM on January 18, 2005

With Windows Media you can specify the start time in an ASX file:

<asx version="3.0">
<entry>
<ref href ="mms://www.pathtowmfile/filename.asf" />
<starttime value="20.0"/>
</entry>
</asx>

posted by filmgoerjuan at 2:27 PM on January 18, 2005