How to extract duration time from ffmpeg output?

Question

To get a lot of information about a media file one can do

ffmpeg -i <filename>

where it will output a lot of lines, one in particular

Duration: 00:08:07.98, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 2080 kb/s

I would like to output only 00:08:07.98, so I try

ffmpeg -i file.mp4 | grep Duration| sed 's/Duration: \(.*\), start/\1/g'

But it prints everything, and not just the length.

Even ffmpeg -i file.mp4 | grep Duration outputs everything.

How do I get just the duration length?

Solution 1

ffmpeg is writing that information to stderr, not stdout. Try this:

ffmpeg -i file.mp4 2>&1 | grep Duration | sed 's/Duration: \(.*\), start/\1/g'

Notice the redirection of stderr to stdout: 2>&1

EDIT:

Your sed statement isn't working either. Try this:

ffmpeg -i file.mp4 2>&1 | grep Duration | awk '{print $2}' | tr -d ,

Solution 2

You can use ffprobe:

ffprobe -i <file> -show_entries format=duration -v quiet -of csv="p=0"

It will output the duration in seconds, such as:

154.12

Adding the -sexagesimal option will output duration as hours:minutes:seconds.microseconds:

00:02:34.12

Solution 3

From my experience many tools offer the desired data in some kind of a table/ordered structure and also offer parameters to gather specific parts of that data. This applies to e.g. smartctl, nvidia-smi and ffmpeg/ffprobe, too. Simply speaking - often there's no need to pipe data around or to open subshells for such a task.

As a consequence I'd use the right tool for the job - in that case ffprobe would return the raw duration value in seconds, afterwards one could create the desired time format on his own:

$ ffmpeg --version
ffmpeg version 2.2.3 ...

The command may vary dependent on the version you are using.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
input_file="/path/to/media/file"

# Get raw duration value
ffprobe -v quiet -print_format compact=print_section=0:nokey=1:escape=csv -show_entries format=duration "$input_file"

An explanation:

"-v quiet": Don't output anything else but the desired raw data value

"-print_format": Use a certain format to print out the data

"compact=": Use a compact output format

"print_section=0": Do not print the section name

":nokey=1": do not print the key of the key:value pair

":escape=csv": escape the value

"-show_entries format=duration": Get entries of a field named duration inside a section named format

Reference: ffprobe man pages

Solution 4

In case of one request parameter it is simplier to use mediainfo and its output formatting like this (for duration; answer in milliseconds)

mediainfo --Output="General;%Duration%" ~/work/files/testfiles/+h263_aac.avi 

outputs

24840

Solution 5

I recommend using json format, it's easier for parsing

ffprobe -i your-input-file.mp4 -v quiet -print_format json -show_format -show_streams -hide_banner

{
    "streams": [
        {
            "index": 0,
            "codec_name": "aac",
            "codec_long_name": "AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)",
            "profile": "HE-AACv2",
            "codec_type": "audio",
            "codec_time_base": "1/44100",
            "codec_tag_string": "[0][0][0][0]",
            "codec_tag": "0x0000",
            "sample_fmt": "fltp",
            "sample_rate": "44100",
            "channels": 2,
            "channel_layout": "stereo",
            "bits_per_sample": 0,
            "r_frame_rate": "0/0",
            "avg_frame_rate": "0/0",
            "time_base": "1/28224000",
            "duration_ts": 305349201,
            "duration": "10.818778",
            "bit_rate": "27734",
            "disposition": {
                "default": 0,
                "dub": 0,
                "original": 0,
                "comment": 0,
                "lyrics": 0,
                "karaoke": 0,
                "forced": 0,
                "hearing_impaired": 0,
                "visual_impaired": 0,
                "clean_effects": 0,
                "attached_pic": 0
            }
        }
    ],
    "format": {
        "filename": "your-input-file.mp4",
        "nb_streams": 1,
        "nb_programs": 0,
        "format_name": "aac",
        "format_long_name": "raw ADTS AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)",
        "duration": "10.818778",
        "size": "37506",
        "bit_rate": "27734",
        "probe_score": 51
    }
}

you can find the duration information in format section, works both for video and audio

View more solutions

Comments

[potong]

Grep is unnecessary,sed -n 's/Duration: \(.*\), start/\1/gp' is suffice.

[ДМИТРИЙ МАЛИКОВ]

Actually, sed is unnecessary: ffmpeg -i file.mp4 2>&1 | grep -o -P "(?<=Duration: ).*?(?=,)"

[vertigoelectric]

What's the context for this if I want to store the duration as a variable to be used within the same PHP script?

[praxmon]

How to do the same thing in Python?

[Pogrindis]

This should be 'mediainfo --Inform="General;%Duration%" ~/work/files/testfiles/+h263_aac.avi'

[Sunry]

For my ffmpeg-0.6.5-1.el6.rf.x86_64, the format is: ffprobe <file> -show_format 2>&1 | sed -n 's/duration=//p'

[Saucier]

In my opinion that's the wrong tools for the job. Why pipe the data around if ffmpeg/ffprobe offers tools to access the raw data?

[nha]

Is there something I can do when the result is : "Duration: N/A, bitrate: N/A" ? I use this file : media.xiph.org/video/derf/y4m/suzie_qcif.y4m

[llogan]

The counterfeit "ffmpeg" from Libav (a fork of the FFmpeg project) has been replaced by avconv from Libav. ffmpeg from FFmpeg is under very active development.

[Pirkka Esko]

This is the way to go. ffmpeg -i always wanted to transcode a new file after printing the data. Way cleaner solution right here.

[Pirkka Esko]

Using ffprobe as instructed in other answers seems a way cleaner and hassle-free-er approach :)

[bovender]

Should be the accepted answer, although the output format (seconds) is not quite exactly what was asked for.

[llogan]

@bovender Answer updated with option to output desired format.

[bovender]

@LordNeckbeard Now it really should be the accepted answer!

[FtheBuilder]

This helped me a lot man! congrats. I wanted the total amount of seconds...

[llogan]

grep, cut, and sed are unecessary. See Ivan's answer.

[sparsh turkane]

why unnecessary i don't understand it gives the result

[llogan]

Because you can just use ffprobe alone. Also, the output of ffmpeg is for informational purposes only and not for parsing: it is not guaranteed to always about the same structure, format, and information with various ffmpeg versions and various input formats.

[Tina J]

@LordNeckbeard what is the edit to get exactly in seconds integer (no float points? e.g. 154

[gemelen]

Both forms work identically within mediainfo v18.05 (and seems to be with previous versions).

[Alexander Korzhykov]

@PirkkaEsko ffmpeg will report the correct duration in some cases when using ffprobe gives you incorrect or missing duration due to corrupt, truncated, or damaged files.

[petezurich]

@PrakharMohanSrivastava See my answer for using a python script to retrieve length and other metadata.

[Rabindranath Andujar]

This code doesn't work: Traceback (most recent call last): File "ffprobe.py", line 9, in <module> print("Length of file is: {}".format(float(length["format"]["duration"]))) NameError: name 'length' is not defined This should do the job: import subprocess import json input_file = "out.mp4" metadata = subprocess.check_output(f"ffprobe -i {input_file} -v quiet -print_format json -show_format -hide_banner".split(" ")) metadata = json.loads(metadata) print("Length of file is: {}".format(float(metadata["format"]["duration"]))) print(metadata)

[petezurich]

@RabindranathAndujar I rechecked. You are right. The code works, but the line for the printout had an error in it. I corrected the code and now it runs fine. Thanks for pointing it out.

[Matt W]

Thank you! This is exactly what I needed!

[agarg]

This script will fail for filenames with special characters on both linux and windows

[Ray Woodcock]

Alternately ffprobe -i "input.mp4" -show_entries format=duration -v quiet -of csv="p=0" -sexagesimal

[Tovi Newman]

Careful though. ffprobe reads metadata. Depending on the file source this could be inaccurate.

[phuclv]

calling strlen everytime is a bad idea, and correct[strlen(time)]='/0'; is definitely wrong. It should be '\0' instead of '/0'

[ychaouche]

Actually, both grep and sed are unnecessary : awk '/Duration/ {print $2}'

[Alexander C]

Excellent. Machine readable answer!

[jarno]

Very fast compared to ffmpeg or ffprobe.

[jarno]

--Inform is the way told in the manual page.