playing a specific interval of a video in mplayer using command line option

Question

I am using mplayer to play videos... I wanted to know if there are command line options to play a specific interval of a video in mplayer? For example, if I want to play a video file from 56 secs for a duration of 3 secs, then what would the command line options be? I know about the -ss option that will seek to a specific position, but how do I specify the duration that I want to play? Concretely, if I want a command that plays a video file starting at the beginning of the 56th second and plays 3 seconds of the video (i.e., until the beginning of the 59th sec, or equivalently, the end of the 58th sec.), what would the command look like?

I have been looking at the man page, but no success as yet. Maybe I am missing something. I really appreciate your help!

Answer 1

man mplayer

reveals:

-ss <time>: Seek to given time position
-endpos <[[hh:]mm:]ss[.ms]|size[b|kb|mb]>: Stop at given time or byte position

so you should be able to do what you want by simple using:

mplayer -ss 56 -endpos 3

Answer 2

Using mpv, a fork of MPlayer:

# specify start and length
mpv --start=3:20 --length=10 <file-name>

# specifying end
mpv --start=30 --end=40 <file-name>

# specifying end from end
mpv --start=80 --end=-90 <file-name>

More at mpv manual.