The following works very nicely to determine the length of various audio/video files:
mplayer -identify file.ogg 2>/dev/null | grep ID_LENGTH
However, I want to kill mplayer's output so I can determine the length of many files more efficiently. How do I do that?
The MPlayer
source ships with a sample script called midentify
, which looks like this:
#!/bin/sh
#
# This is a wrapper around the -identify functionality.
# It is supposed to escape the output properly, so it can be easily
# used in shellscripts by 'eval'ing the output of this script.
#
# Written by Tobias Diedrich <ranma+mplayer@tdiedrich.de>
# Licensed under GNU GPL.
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo "Usage: midentify.sh <file> [<file> ...]"
exit 1
fi
mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -identify "$@" 2>/dev/null |
sed -ne '/^ID_/ {
s/[]()|&;<>`'"'"'\\!$" []/\\&/g;p
}'
The -frames 0
makes mplayer
exit immediately, and the -vo null -ao null
prevent it from trying to open any video or audio devices. These options are all documented in man mplayer
.
FFMPEG can give you the same information in a different format (and doesn't attempt playing the file):
ffmpeg -i <myfile>
There's another FF-way in addition to @codelogic's method, which doesn't exit with an error:
ffprobe <file>
and look for the duration entry.
Or grep for it directly in the error stream:
ffprobe <file> 2> >(grep Duration)
looks like there are a few other libs available, see time length of an mp3 file