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?
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.
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 the codec_name
for all other streams in the file, such as audio, will be shown as well.
-show_entries stream=codec_name
Only output the codec_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
ffprobe
documentation
- FFmpeg Wiki: FFprobe Tips
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