Using Hookmark with Apple’s QuickTime Player: Deep Links to Specific Timestamps 😊

Hookmark enables you to link media files in Apple’s QuickTime Player to and from anything that is linkable.

What’s more you can copy deep links to specific locations (timestamps) within a media file! That is super handy because if a video is very long, you typically don’t want to watch the entire thing again. You want to be able to bookmark a specific location in the media file. That enables you to return to exactly the location that matters to you.

Copy Link, Copy Markdown Link and Hook to Copied Link

By default, Hookmark’s Copy Link and Copy Markdown Link in QuickTime Player return links of the form hook://file/<...>. You can paste those links anywhere. You can even use them on your iPad or iPhone. And of course you can hook them to other items.

Here’s how to copy a link to a specific media file in QuickTime with Hookmark. While in QuickTime with a file open:

  1. Invoke Hookmark (⌃H or menu bar icon).
  2. ⌘C (or Title menu, Copy Link).

That’s it! Paste the link anywhere.

Deep links to specific time stamps in a QuickTime file!

With Hookmark, when you Copy Link or Copy Markdown Link in the context of QuickTime Player, you get a link to the current location in the file. That enables you to get to particular timestamps in the file.

Here’s an example Markdown link to a file named Marylke.mov: [Marylke.mov](hook://file/5dae4NuLi?p=UmVjb3JkaW5ncy9Ib21lIHZpZGVvcw==&n=Marylke%2Emov#t=180). Notice that #t= introduces the timestamp parameter in seconds (and decimal fractions of seconds); the value is 180 seconds, which is of course 3 minutes into the video. (FYI: n= is the filename).

When you open the link, QuickTime will scroll to that location. Of course, that depends on QuickTime being the default media for the file type. If it’s not, Hookmark will still instruct macOS to open the file for you, but the specific time stamp information may be ignored.

This is analogous to Hookmark’s deep linking capability with PDF files. See Using Hookmark with the Free Skim PDF Reader app: Deep Links!.

(We used Markdown in the example above so you can inspect the link in this page. You can also use Copy Link rather than Copy Markdown Link.)

How to view multiple deep links

Whenever you use Copy Link or Copy Markdown Link in a different location of the same media file, Hookmark will create a new bookmark for that specific timestamp.

However, if you ‘hook’ multiple URLs within the same QuickTime file to another given file (“Foo”), on the destination (“Foo”) side you will only see one hook (link) to the original media file. This is to declutter the window and accommodate the most common use case.

If you do want to see multiple links to the same file, Hookmark has you covered there too:

  1. You can access all the individual bookmarks (timestamps) by using Hookmark’s search tool.
  2. You can also of course paste individual links directly in other files. In fact you can even copy multiple search results and paste them anywhere.

You can move and rename media files too

As with other Finder files supported by Hookmark (using the hook://file/ URL scheme), you can move these files around and Hookmark links will normally still work.

Forum

Thanks to @stevelw on the Hookmark Forum for contributing the script upon which Hookmark’s QuickTime integration is based. We rounded it out to make it use hook://file/ URLs, which are robust.