Storing timepoints or durations - c++

Question

I want to make a simple editor to shift subtitle times around. A Subtitle of WebVTT is made of chunks like this:
1
00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:20.000
- Hello World!
So as you can see there is a time that the subtitle will apear and a time that it dissapears. This time is also can be clicked to jump to that specific point of the video file.
Now I want to create a simple application that can shift these times by a given amount to left or right in time domain. What would be the best way to store these timepoints for making easy calculation and changes?
For example:
struct SubtitleElement {
std::chrono< ?????? > begin; // What is a good candidate here?
std::chrono< ?????? > end; // What is a good candidate here?
std::string text;
}
Later I want to have functions that operate on these elements. E.g.:
void shiftTime(SubtitleElement element, int millisecs) {
// reduce begin and end of the element by millisecs
}
DURATION getDuration(SubtitleElement& element) {
//return end - begin
}
DURATION totalDuration(vector<SubtitleElement> elements) {
// sum all the durations of the elements in vector
}
So what would the most clean and modern way of doing this? Also important is that it will be easy to convert the string "hh:mm:ss:ZZZ" to that member. Please note that I think the hh can be much more than 24, because its amount of time, not time of the day! E.g. a vido file can be 120 hours long!!

Answer 1

Since these are time points relative to the beginning of the video, not to some clock, I suggest keeping it simple and using std::chrono::milliseconds. They support all operations you require, except im not sure there is an existing implementation for parsing them from a string. But that should be very easy to build.