Support for partial timeslice downloading of a video (start time, end time)

[johnhawkinson]

• I've verified and I assure that I'm running youtube-dl 2017.03.02
• Feature request (request for a new functionality)

It ought to be possible to specify downloading a partial timeslice of a video, e.g. ffmpeg's -ss $seek_position and -t $duration options, ideally with a better UI (e.g. start time and end time, at least as an option).

I realize we an sort of achieve this today by passing args to ffmpeg, e.g.

youtube-dl ... --external-downloader ffmpeg --external-downloader-args '-ss 3718.538 -t 60'

or perhaps as a postprocessor arg where appropriate.
But that's not very user-friendly, and knowing when to choose an external downloader versus a postprocessor may not be obvious.

I guess maybe this could just be a FAQ entry, but I think some options would be a better goal.

I realize it probably cannot be made to work in all cases.

[yan12125]

Duplicate of #622

[Ectomind1990]

Worth adding the "request" label to this issue?

I searched using that label an hour ago but didn't find anything so created #16665 which is now rightly closed as a duplicate

I know that #622 already has the "request" label but the word "range" wasn't one of the searches I tried so I didn't find it, but I would have found this