My program needs to recover time from Reaper (hms)

[Alain78]

I have developed a program that uses Reaper as a MIDI recorder hidden from the user view point to benefit from strictly useful functions without learning or changing the user interface. The commands are sent by MIDI messages : Load/save a project, record, play, pause, set markers... Everything works very well. Reaper is really simple to interface.
Now, I wish that my program could display the time (minutes, seconds) in recording and playback mode.
In a word I simply wish that my program would be able to display the hms time as Reaper does. But how ? Could you help me ?

I know that one possibility would be to get SPP messages in a continuous way but currently my Reaper installation only emits them during pauses in playback.
I know that the MTC messages give the time during recording and playback but not when positioning to a marker or at the beginning of the recording whereas SPP messages do. More, they represent an important load. At one point I saw an MTC message in SysEx form... how I don't know... since then nothing. Should be better.
I have to admit that I don't know how to convert the values of the SPP messages into seconds...