mp4 starting position

[SeattleVideo]

I have a spreadsheet that contains links in a cell to play a particular video from my computer. The video plays fine but what if I want to start that video from a particular position. For example, I want to add a link in a spreadsheet cell to play a video from the starting position of 1 minute, 20 seconds. Is there a way to add a suffix to the URL to start at that position? I have read that Google can do that from a Drive file, but this is not on my Google Drive.

Thanks in advance
Terry

[poisondeathray]

I have a spreadsheet that contains links in a cell to play a particular video from my computer. The video plays fine but what if I want to start that video from a particular position. For example, I want to add a link in a spreadsheet cell to play a video from the starting position of 1 minute, 20 seconds. Is there a way to add a suffix to the URL to start at that position? I have read that Google can do that from a Drive file, but this is not on my Google Drive.

What player or interface ? URL usually deals with a web host , if it's local on your computer you can call it with ffplay as the player using -ss for start time (hours : minutes : seconds)

eg.
ffplay -i "input.mp4" -ss 00:01:20


If it's through a html5 browser like chrome, firefox , you can use #t=00:01:20 in the src tag
eg.
<source src="input.mp4#t=00:01:20" type="video/mp4">

[SeattleVideo]

Is there a way to call ffplay from Excel or start the video another way? I can create a link inside a cell and point it to the mp4 file to run it but Excel does not recognize the "time start" extension, it will just play it from the beginning.

Thanks

[Cornucopia]

Try a link to a MM metafile, such as ASX or SMIL, etc. (aka "playlist"). Excel should still treat it the same, and you can edit the metafile to have a particular start time, loop time, etc.

<edit>Yep, just tried it. Works perfectly with ASX linking to an MP4. Started 2 minutes in. Just make sure you understand about relative vs. absolute paths (better if it's relative here, and should ALREADY be in same subdir when starting out).</edit>

Scott