How can I get the length of a video file from the console?

Question

Suppose we have a video file some_video.

How can I get its length from a shell script (with mplayer/transcode/gstreamer/vlc/ffmpeg/whatever)?

VIDEO_LENGTH_IN_SECONDS=`ffmpeg .... -i some_video ... | grep -o .....`

Solution 1

ffprobe -i some_video -show_entries format=duration -v quiet -of csv="p=0"

will return the video duration in seconds.

Solution 2

Something similar to:

ffmpeg -i input 2>&1 | grep "Duration"| cut -d ' ' -f 4 | sed s/,//

This will deliver: HH:MM:SS.ms. You can also use ffprobe, which is supplied with most FFmpeg installations:

ffprobe -show_format input | sed -n '/duration/s/.*=//p'

… or:

ffprobe -show_format input | grep duration | sed 's/.*=//')

To convert into seconds (and retain the milliseconds), pipe into:

awk '{ split($1, A, ":"); print 3600*A[1] + 60*A[2] + A[3] }'

---

To convert it into milliseconds, pipe into:

awk '{ split($1, A, ":"); print 3600000*A[1] + 60000*A[2] + 1000*A[3] }'

If you want just the seconds without the milliseconds, pipe into:

awk '{ split($1, A, ":"); split(A[3], B, "."); print 3600*A[1] + 60*A[2] + B[1] }'

Example:

Solution 3

ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 movie.mp4

Will return the total duration in seconds. (video+audio) = 124.693091

ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 movie.mp4

Will return only video duration in seconds stream=duration = 123.256467

ffprobe -v error -sexagesimal -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 movie.mp4

Will return only video duration using the -sexagesimal format. = 0:02:03.256467

Comments

[evilsoup]

...my edit was rejected, so I'll post here that the first step can be more concisely accomplished with ffprobe, a tool designed for exactly these sort of purposes that is packaged with ffmpeg: ffprobe -show_format input | sed -n '/duration/s/.*=//p' (or ffprobe -show_format input | grep duration | sed 's/.*=//'). Maybe @slhck can edit this straight into the answer.

[slhck]

Sorry about that, @evilsoup. Maybe I should make a disclaimer that you and LordNeckbeard are allowed to freely edit my posts—I've had this problem a few times already. Next time just add a little note to the edit message or so :)

[ckujau]

Did not know about ffprobe, thanks!

[Elisa Cha Cha]

Eliminate the need for jq and tr: mediainfo --Output="General;%Duration/String%" input

[ToBeReplaced]

Neat! I'm going to leave my answer unedited for now because the output of your command is of the form X s YYY ms versus X.YYY. Easy enough to adjust with | sed -e 's/ s /./' -e 's/ ms//' if you want to go that route and do not have access to jq.

[Elisa Cha Cha]

That can be changed with mediainfo --Output="General;%Duration/String3%" input to output 00:01:48.501 instead of 1 min 48 s.