ffprobe select audio and video streams

Question

I use this code for extracting video information by ffprobe :

ffprobe -show_streams -of json -v quiet -i input.mp4

The information of all streams appears in the output while I need only the information of v:0 and a:0 streams.

I know that there is -select_streams option for stream selection but it accepts only one argument like: -select_streams v:0.

Can I use -select_streams by two arguments v:0 and a:0 or using it twice?

Solution 1

I know that I'm late to the party, but in case anybody else searches for something similar (from here):

ffprobe -show_streams -select_streams a INPUT

where a stands for audio and could of course be replaced by:

• v for video;
• a:1 for the audio packets belonging to audio stream with index 1;
• v:99 for the video packets belonging to video stream with index 99 and so on.

Note that if you want to view 2 different streams (like audio and video) you need to run ffprobe twice.

For more goodies, although very generally written, you can also check: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/FFprobeTips

Solution 2

I had a similar scenario where I wanted to limit the output of ffprobe -show_frames to a specific audio and video streams.

It seems that -select_streams cannot accept more than 1 stream_specifier nor can it be provided multiple times for the same ffprobe command.

Moreover, ffprobe do not accept the -map parameter like ffmpeg does. This parameters allows ffmpeg to process specific streams and can be provided multiple times.

What I ended up doing is filtering the required streams using ffmpeg -map and piping the output to ffprobe -show_frames as follows:

    ffmpeg -i INPUT -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -c copy -f matroska - | ffprobe -show_frames -

Several notes:

• I used -f matroska in ffmpeg command since this muxer support non-seekable output (stdout)
• the -c copy is necessary to avoid transcoding of the selected streams.

Solution 3

You can simply omit the -select_streams argument and use the -show_entries argument to pass the fields you would like to see in the output, like so:

ffprobe -show_streams -show_entries format=bit_rate,filename,start_time:stream=duration,width,height,display_aspect_ratio,r_frame_rate,bit_rate -of json -v quiet -i input.mp4

That should give you an output similar to this:

{
    "programs": [

    ],
    "streams": [
        {
            "width": 360,
            "height": 202,
            "display_aspect_ratio": "16:9",
            "r_frame_rate": "2997/100",
            "duration": "68.601935",
            "bit_rate": "449366",
            "disposition": {
                "default": 1,
                "dub": 0,
                "original": 0,
                "comment": 0,
                "lyrics": 0,
                "karaoke": 0,
                "forced": 0,
                "hearing_impaired": 0,
                "visual_impaired": 0,
                "clean_effects": 0,
                "attached_pic": 0
            },
            "tags": {
                "language": "eng",
                "handler_name": "VideoHandler"
            }
        },
        {
            "r_frame_rate": "0/0",
            "duration": "68.475646",
            "bit_rate": "65845",
            "disposition": {
                "default": 1,
                "dub": 0,
                "original": 0,
                "comment": 0,
                "lyrics": 0,
                "karaoke": 0,
                "forced": 0,
                "hearing_impaired": 0,
                "visual_impaired": 0,
                "clean_effects": 0,
                "attached_pic": 0
            },
            "tags": {
                "language": "eng",
                "handler_name": "SoundHandler"
            }
        }
    ],
    "format": {
        "filename": "input.mp4",
        "start_time": "0.000000",
        "bit_rate": "522013"
    }
}

From which you can just index into the stream you want, as shown in Powershell, with the JSON object streams that is returned:

PS C:\Users\User> $json.streams[0]


width                : 360
height               : 202
display_aspect_ratio : 16:9
r_frame_rate         : 2997/100
duration             : 68.601935
bit_rate             : 449366
disposition          : @{default=1; dub=0; original=0; comment=0; lyrics=0; karaoke=0; forced=0; hearing_impaired=0; visual_impaired=0; clean_effects=0; attached_pic=0}
tags                 : @{language=eng; handler_name=VideoHandler}




PS C:\Users\User> $json.streams[1]


r_frame_rate : 0/0
duration     : 68.475646
bit_rate     : 65845
disposition  : @{default=1; dub=0; original=0; comment=0; lyrics=0; karaoke=0; forced=0; hearing_impaired=0; visual_impaired=0; clean_effects=0; attached_pic=0}
tags         : @{language=eng; handler_name=SoundHandler}

There are a list of the key field names that you can get from the different types of streams here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/FFprobeTips

Comments

[jpillora]

Furthermore, if you want all stream and format information, you can omit =field,field,field... and just use ffprobe -show_streams -show_entries "format:stream" -of json -v quiet -i input.mp4