[MPlayer-users] disagreement between mplayer displayed timecode and -ss flag

[Dean S. Messing]

Loren Merritt wrote:
 :: On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Dean S. Messing wrote:
 :: 
 :: > I'm trying to extract a small swath of frames from the _Titanic_ DVD
 :: > in order to test some video processing algorithms.  I find the
 :: > approximate beginning of where I want to extract by viewig the DVD and
 :: > watching the "V: xxx.x" timecodes go by on the text output of the
 :: > commandline:
 :: >
 :: >      mplayer dvd://1  -nosound  -monitoraspect 16:9
 :: >
 :: > I find that what I want starts at about "V: 265.0"
 :: >
 :: > But when I then do
 :: >
 :: > mplayer dvd://1  -nosound  -ss 265 -frames 200 -monitoraspect 16:9
 :: >
 :: > what gets played is somewhere around 435 seconds.
 :: 
 :: That's just the way DVD timecodes work: It's not possible to seek
 :: to a specified position (other than chapter breaks) without scanning the
 :: entire stream up to the target position. That would be very slow, so
 :: MPlayer's default is to guess a byte offset based on the DVD's nominal
 :: average bitrate.
 :: 

Thanks Loren.  I did not know this and it is very helpful.  (I hope
it's not in "TFM".)


So the next question is: is there a way to get running byte (or Kbyte,
or Mbyte) position as the movie plays?  I realise that this will not
be "byte accurate" but I could then get a lot closer to where I want
to be (with the -sb flag) than I'm getting now.

Dean

P.S. I just realised that -sb is probably in "compressed bytes" so this
idea probably won't work.  But if is not, then maybe ...