Don, I just tried setting the sourceOffset to a positive number. According to the documentation, that is only for a media file, and I’m indirectly using a stream. I say "indirectly" because the playlist is actually accessing a .vod file. I guess I didn’t think it applied to my situation, since I’m trying to play a media file, so I hadn’t previously tried it.
But using zero or a positive number for the sourceOffset seemed to work OK. I couldn’t do much with a duration of 0 (which is supposed to display a single frame), but that could just be because I’m accessing a .vod or perhaps the first frame is not anything … I don’t really know. However, specifying 2 or 3 for the duration got me to an image at least (although VLC sure seemed to run up my CPU on the client side!). It will also play those duration seconds over and over again (although, it did not seem to constantly open and close the inStream or the outStream, so that’s sort of acceptable, I guess).
Thanks for the suggestion!