How to jump to a time in a video in VLC Player on Windows 10
There are few features that a user can imagine a media player should have that VLC player doesn’t support. The app may have some limitations, or some features such as its support for Chromescast may not work as great, but it nevertheless checks all the boxes and then some. If you need to jump to a time in a video in VLC, rest assured that you can do it.
The feature is built in but in this post, we’re also going to show you how to use two useful switches to always skip a certain amount of time for all videos it opens, or to only play them to a specific time.
Jump to time
This is a feature that allows you to jump to a specific time in a video, on the fly. Open VLC player and select the video you want to play. Once the video is playing, go to the Playback menu. Select Jump to Specific time. Alternatively, use the Ctrl+T keyboard shortcut.
A small window will open allowing you to select what time in the video you want to jump to.
Open and close at time
If you want VLC player to always skip a certain amount of time when it opens a video, any video, you can use a switch that will force it to do so.
A switch is applied to a shortcut for the player. You can create more than one shortcut so that you have one that you can use to skip or stop the video at a specific time, and use another to open the app normally.
Create shortcut
The first step is to create a shortcut to the VLC player. You can do this by looking for the EXE of the file, and creating a shortcut from the context menu. Alternatively, right-click VLC in the apps’ list on the Start Menu and select More>Open file location. In the File Explorer window that opens, right-click the VLC player shortcut and select Send to > Desktop (create shortcut) from the context menu.
Add switches
Go to your desktop and right-click the shortcut. Select Properties from the context menu. The Properties window will open to the Shortcut tab which has a Target field. You need to add the switch at the end of the path in the Target field.
To always have VLC player skip a certain amount of time when it opens a video, enter the following switch;
--start-time=[Time in seconds]
If you want VLC player to always skip the first ten minutes of a video, you will enter the following.
--start-time=600
If you want VLC to only play videos up to a certain amount of time, you need to enter the following switch
--stop-time=[Time in seconds]
If you want VLC player to only play one hour of video, you will enter the following;
--stop-time=3600
Playing videos
To play a video, you can drag & drop it on to the shortcut, or you can open VLC player with the shortcut and use the Media>Open file option to select a video to play. So long as VLC player is launched from the shortcut you’ve applied the switch to, the switch will work.
If you need to run VLC player without the switches, simply run it from the apps’ list or create a new shortcut for it. You can create as many shortcuts for an app as you want.
