Is there a way to use ffmpeg to determine the encoding of a file before transcoding?
Solution 1
If you pass an input file to ffmpeg, without other parameters, it will give you information about the video source:
ffmpeg -i myfile.avi
Another way would be the -identify
option of mplayer, which might be slightly easier to parse. There is a wrapper script midentify
which gives you even better output. See this example.
Solution 2
Use ffprobe
Example command
$ ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=codec_name -of default=nokey=1:noprint_wrappers=1 input.mp4
Result
h264
Option descriptions
-
-v error
Omit extra information except for fatal errors. -
-select_streams v:0
Select only the first video stream. Otherwise thecodec_name
for all other streams in the file, such as audio, will be shown as well. -
-show_entries stream=codec_name
Only output thecodec_name
instead of all stream info. -
-of default=nokey=1:noprint_wrappers=1
Select the default output format style and omit the key and wrapper info. Otherwise, without these options, it will output:[STREAM] codec_name=h264 [/STREAM]
Also see
Bash script example
Only re-encode if video is not H.264:
#!/bin/bash
mkdir h264vids
for f in *.mkv
do
audioformat=$(ffprobe -loglevel error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=codec_name -of default=nw=1:nk=1 "$f")
if [ "$audioformat" = "h264" ]; then
ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:v copy -c:a aac -movflags +faststart h264vids/"${f%.*}.mp4"
else
ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:v libx264 -c:a aac -movflags +faststart h264vids/"${f%.*}.mp4"
fi
done
This is a simple script and will ignore additional video streams if you input has more than one.
Solution 3
An alternative is to use ffprobe
which is included with ffmpeg. The following will give the most terse output I can find from the ffmpeg tools:
ffprobe -hide_banner -stats -i myfile.avi
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Admin
Updated on May 08, 2021Comments
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Admin about 3 years
I am planning to use ffmpeg to ensure all video files uploaded to my website are encoded as mp4 h264.
Rather than automatically processing every file I would like to minimise the processing overhead by only processing those files that are not already mp4 h264. Is there an easy way to do this either with ffmpeg or with another command line utility?
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Admin about 13 yearsGreat that gives me the info I need. Would like not to have to parse the output though :)
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Darren Greaves over 12 yearsMediaInfo can do this and has optional XML output. mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en - grab the command line version.
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mente over 10 yearsffmpeg package includes command
ffprobe
that supports several output formats such as xml and json. Eases parsing of ffmpeg output