Remember position

[mrl1138]

Another solution:

Open VLC,
Press CTRL+L to view the Playlist,
Choose Media Library in a left pane,
Right click on an empty space and add files or a folder with movies,
Add bookmark(s) in any movie at any time, that you want to start playing from next time you open VLC.

When you open VLC again, it gonna keep your Media Library list so you can easily get back to whatever movie you were watching and use bookmarks that you set, to play from the last time you stopped, no need to save anything like playlists etc.

[fredphoesh]

Wow, two and a half years later and this basic feature still has not made it to vlc... has it been forgotten?

I was just pouring through the incredible advanced options, amazingly powerful... but this is a must have feature and I am baffled why it has not been implemented, there are several threads about this subject, so obviously many, many people would want it...

Please guys, dont forget about it...

Thanks,
Mark.

[VLC_help]

Wow, two and a half years later and this basic feature still has not made it to vlc... has it been forgotten?

Nobody has implemented this. VLC is a volunteer project, nobody is forced to do anything.

[Adrioid]

Incorrect, MPlayerX for OSX did.

Quote from http://mplayerx.org: "Forget where you stopped playing last time? MPlayerX won't."

Please add this feature to get one more step closer to perfect!

[Sébastien Escudier]

No, he meant : Nobody has implemented this in VLC

[Adrioid]

Aaah, gotcha! My bad.

[laldrich]

The way I do it: while watching the vid I pause it at the point I want VLC to remember. I make note of the time mark below the volume indicator, then jot this time down on a piece of paper. Next time I open the vid I go to Jump To Specific Time (CTRL + T), enter the time I want to go to, and hit go. If any of the time units are single digits, use a leading zero or it won't work.

Works for me.

[Adrioid]

touché!

[CulleyS]

I understand that dev time is limited and completely voluntary, but this would be a great feature to have. There are workarounds, but those workarounds don't take into account the most likely time I'd want to have vlc remember my position: i.e. in cases where vlc exits unexpectedly. During a reboot, if the program crashes during playback, if the computer locks up, if another media file is opened before the current one is finished, etc.

On a side note, VLC is still my goto media player and has been for six years or so now and I really appreciate all the hard work the devs have invested into this and other VideoLAN projects.

Culley

[Dreamer]

Will be implemented with the dB in 1.1

Nice, but v2.0.0 is out and I still can't find this feature.

I used to record few hours of DVB video, even 5 and more, so it's even more annoying if I lose position there.

My suggestions for the feature:

Remember the time position on close and even if another file/video is opened (by accident), so just go back, or run previous file again. This way few files should be saved in cache, perhaps just one option, "Remember time position: [#]", where # would be number of cached files, 0 means disabled.

BTW AIMP (the best audio player ) has such a feature too and I couldn't live without it now.

Please.

[ziporpor]

Here's my method to overcome this issue:

When arriving to the point were you want to pause, click "Playback -> Custom Bookmarks -> Manage" in the top menu row
In the "Edit Bookmarks" window, press on "Create" and then on "Close".
Now, click on "Media" in the top menu row and then on "Save Playlist To File..."
In the "Save Playlist As..." window, choose a location and a name to your file and press "Save".

Now you can close the player and go to your business.

Whenever you want to continue from the spot you left, just open the playlist file with the player, go to "Playback -> Custom Bookmarks" in the top menu row and choose the spot from which you want to continue...


Hope I helped...

[Shambler0]

Bookmarks are great, but they are pretty much inconvenient: how many times have you forgotten to bookmark the position?
So a dedicated feature would really be appreciated.


I suggest a quick way to do this:

Remember last URL and last position on exiting.
If player is started with empty command line (or by opening same file), open that last played file and restore the position.
Whenever user opens any other file, forget the position.
A user is responsible for modifying the video themself. Not many sane people would do that anyway.

For DVDs it is best to just remember DVD-label this way, 95% that it will be enough. A hash of that + file-date + file-size is a 99.99% file identification.
or you may just disable the feature for DVDs by default and warn users of possible confusion when they try to enable it.

As for playlists, you probably should store a playlist URL also; if user tries to play last playlist, set its current position to match saved song's URL; forget everything otherwise.


The other way is harder, but nicer:

A bookmark would be added to a file being played whenever the player is closed (and playback position is not zero), and such a bookmark is deleted when affected file finishes playing. Such bookmark would be auto-used when its file is loaded (except when a playlist is being played AND last file in that playlist has just finished playing -- to prevent confusion).

DVDs should probably be bookmarked based on dvd-labels and track# instead of file URLs. This includes normal bookmarks, if it is not done this way already.

I am not sure, how VLC handles bookmarks in playlists, if any; you should just decide how to implement it based on how would it be easier to do so.


But anyway, at least ANY support of this feature would be nice.

[darthclide]

I don't know if there is a request already for this, but I have been waiting for a long time for this feature to be implemented. I keep holding out hope that they will do this because like a few others said, even the most simplest form would be a line of code that says "put time-position" into a txt file or some other location. When you open up the file it automatically goes to that position.. I guess I am just confused on why it isn't a popular enough feature to be implemented... I for one, listen to whole sets of classical music that have 100+ tracks, and it is frustrating to "lose" my position on exit... It is nearly impossible to find out where I left off.

[scientificswede]

I wrote a plugin that does exactly this. The one annoying thing with it is that you have to manually activate it from the menu every time you start VLC. I also couldn't login to the Extensions site for some reason so here's the link to my blog where it's posted:

http://scientificswede.blogspot.se/2012 ... h-lua.html

[mederi]

Amazing extension! Thank you very much.
Scientificswede, could you please start a new topic, for example "VLC Extension: Remember position", in Scripting VLC in lua section, so we can discuss the script there? Thanks.

[Dirkk]

Do you have each time to activate the option to let VLC automatically remember the position? After activating the option and closing VLC "Remember Position" is unchecked.

So VLC does not automatically jump to the position automatically when starting it? You have to check "Remember Position" each time?

[blyst]

Maybe the author himself will advise on this but my observation is that 'remember position' must be checked PRIOR to closing a file (or VLC). Then, later, when the file is re-opened, checking 'remember position' will make the file jump to its previous closing position.

- forgot to say a big 'thank you' to scientificswede for this. Apart from the minor inconvenience that the option has to be rechecked each time, it works really well!

[Dirkk]

OK, many thanks.

Do you mean to say "thank you" or not to say it?

[captivedev]

Here's my method to overcome this issue:

When arriving to the point were you want to pause, click "Playback -> Custom Bookmarks -> Manage" in the top menu row
In the "Edit Bookmarks" window, press on "Create" and then on "Close".
Now, click on "Media" in the top menu row and then on "Save Playlist To File..."
In the "Save Playlist As..." window, choose a location and a name to your file and press "Save".

Now you can close the player and go to your business.

Whenever you want to continue from the spot you left, just open the playlist file with the player, go to "Playback -> Custom Bookmarks" in the top menu row and choose the spot from which you want to continue...


Hope I helped...

I have version 2.01 installed on my Mac and I cannot seem to find the menu of "Custom Bookmarks" underneath "Playback". Where would I find this feature?

[captivedev]

I wrote a plugin that does exactly this. The one annoying thing with it is that you have to manually activate it from the menu every time you start VLC. I also couldn't login to the Extensions site for some reason so here's the link to my blog where it's posted:

http://scientificswede.blogspot.se/2012 ... h-lua.html

How would this be installed on the Mac version of VLC?

[mederi]

Installation: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=101881#p343775
Usage:

... The one annoying thing with it is that you have to manually activate it from the menu every time you start VLC. ...

If you activate this extension, it will start to remember filenames and actual time positions of played multimedia files in "pos.txt" file. If you play the remembered multimedia file next time, it will jump to remembered time position.

[johncage]

hey, i am not sure why an extension is necessary for this.
except for the management of bookmarks, the internal system works fine... the only annoying thing is that you can only create one bookmark, the second overwrites first one (sometimes ) i already managed to have even three bookmarks for one file after restarting vlc, but i think that was by accident actually... i have not been able to reproduce this case since then.

by the way:
thank you vlc team: with v2.0.2 direct x audio output for me is controllable again!
donation is on its way!

[Magalaan]

This feature should be implemented by default. How hard can it be? We do not want it to be perfect. Just automatically remember last play position and jump to it on start. If it remembers full path and time that should be enough, Never mind relocated files or same path files on external media.

I think VLC is great program, but this is a show stopper for me. Having such extensive settings, I could not believe this feature was missing, so I searched Internet and came here. Alas.

But no offense the program is great for what it does do, sadly it does not do enough for practical purposes. But thanks for the effort.

[negativeions]

I totally agree. Here's a clue: Just do it! MplayerX does it? How hard is it? Have a god damn check box in the options or whatever for remember last playing position or whatever you want to call it and that's it... a monkey could program it in 5 minutes. Jesus God Damn Christ.

[vanderson]

A while ago I found the lua plugin by Scientificswede. The annoyance of how lua scripts have to be activated (by checkbox every time you open VLC) inspired me to make a bash script (linux only) to add this functionality to VLC.

I added it to the the "contribute & help VLC" forum here:
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=103066

link to script on github: (linux only, includes setup instructions for ubuntu/linux mint users)
https://github.com/vaughnanderson/VLC-R ... _resume.sh

Maybe the core VLC team will add this feature some day?

Scientificswede's lua code is much cleaner than mine (I pretty much slapped it together) but it works seemlessly... Maybe the ideal situation is for VLC to auto start Lua plugins?