[MPlayer-users] More on -ss option

[Salman Khilji]

I got no reply to my previous question so I am asking again.

Basically I do not know how to use the -ss (seek to position on seconds) 
option.  I have extracted a vob from a dvd using vobcopy.  If I open mplayer 
like:

mplayer myvob.vob -ss 20

and immediately pause the player I see :

A:  34.3 V:  34.3 A-V:  0.058 ct:  0.160   20/ 20  17% 10%  1.1% 0 0 0%

on the screen.  There is no connection between 34.3 seconds and 20 seconds.  

One would wonder why I want to do this.  Actually I am trying to use mencoder 
to extract a few scenes from a vob.  I want to know the beginning of the 
scene in seconds and the end of it.  While playing the vob in mplayer I can 
see the beginning, but there is no way I can use the number on the command 
line.   As you can see there is no correlation between what mplayer displays 
and what you have to give it on the command line.  

So I end up having to guess what number using the -ss option would take me to 
the beginning of the scene.  If my guess is wrong, I increment my 
guess....then try again....then sometimes I increment it too much so I have 
to go back.....Well all this takes too much time and I would much rather not 
guess but have mplayer seek to a position exactly what the -ss option 
provides.




Here is my mplayer info:

salman at linux:~> mplayer --version
Using GNU internationalization
Original domain: messages
Original dirname: /usr/share/locale
Current domain: mplayer
Current dirname: /usr/local/share/locale


MPlayer 0.90rc5-2.95.3 (C) 2000-2003 Arpad Gereoffy (see DOCS)

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 Willamette (Family: 8, Stepping: 10)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2

Reading config file /usr/local/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf: No such file or 
directory
Reading config file /home/salman/.mplayer/config
You added '--' but no filenames presented!
salman at linux:~>