Saturday, June 22, 2019

Gospel Video Teaching Using VLC with Timestamped Playback for Clips

When teaching or facilitating a discussion I have found it challenging to use a video clip without losing momentum and/or causing unnecessary distraction from the lesson being taught.
Ideally, video and audio clips should increase the Spirit of the Lord when used.  I've found that having clips previously downloaded and queued helps solve this challenge.

In order to create a playlist file in this manner you'll need VLC and a text editor.  You'll also need to have the media file(s) downloaded and saved in the same directory/folder as the playlist M3U file.

I've downloaded a video file from the April 2019 General Conference address given by a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Elder Bednar, saving it as filename

20190454bednar.mp4

I've created a text file called
2019-06-23_Temple_and_Family_History_Lessson.m3u
in the same folder:
There are 4 "clips" or portions of the video I would like to share during the lesson.  By converting the playback timestamp from minutes:seconds to seconds I've come up with the following stop and start timestamps:

#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=945
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=965
20190454bednar.mp4
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=307
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=396
20190454bednar.mp4
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=462
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=512
20190454bednar.mp4
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=603
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=806
20190454bednar.mp4

The above is the content of the
2019-06-23_Temple_and_Family_History_Lessson.m3u
file.

VLC allows playback to be paused and played using the spacebar key by default.  To jump between clips (N)ext and (P)revious can be used (the letters N and P on the keyboard).

Double-clicking the file
2019-06-23_Temple_and_Family_History_Lessson.m3uwill launch VLC using the playlist of clips using the timestamps specified.

The VLC interface can be further customized via Tools >> Preferences to play full screen by default to minimize distraction. 

VLC can also launch paused by default.