I more of an audio man with pure data, but the visual side is luring me in at the moment.

Before I start hunting up and down the net, is there any way to automate skipping back and fore to various points in a video and playing for various lengths of time?

you can drive the frames manually, by specifying a frame number you send to [pix_film], so you can have counting argorithms as you like, for example driven by a gemhead bang.
Is that helpfull to you?

Hey, Red, been playing around since I saw your post, and made a thingie. It's probably not the best way around your problem, but it does what it should. Every slider has a maximum of 2000, increase that if you need to.

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/videoloop001.pd

thank you I will give that a try now.