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 .....`

score 65 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 02 '14 at 17:43

65

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

will return the video duration in seconds.

answered Jul 02 '14 at 17:43

John Lemberger

sorry for the dump question, but how to get it in minutes and seconds. – Salem F Sep 21 '22 at 18:33

slhck · Answer 2 · 2013-04-21T19:44:23.387

26

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:

enter image description here

edited Apr 21 '13 at 19:44

answered Nov 25 '11 at 12:26

slhck

Also tcprobe is desiged for it, but it doesn't work well on my system. – Vi. Nov 25 '11 at 16:33
1

...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. – evilsoup Apr 21 '13 at 19:20

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 21 '20 at 21:18

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

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 20 '19 at 16:08

0

In case you don't have access to ffprobe, you could use mediainfo.

# Outputs a decimal number in seconds
mediainfo some_video --Output=JSON | jq '.media.track[0].Duration' | tr -d '"'`

answered Mar 20 '19 at 16:08

ToBeReplaced

2

Eliminate the need for `jq` and `tr`: `mediainfo --Output="General;%Duration/String%" input` – llogan Mar 20 '19 at 17:45
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`. – ToBeReplaced Mar 21 '19 at 04:49
1

That can be changed with `mediainfo --Output="General;%Duration/String3%" input` to output `00:01:48.501` instead of `1 min 48 s`. – llogan Mar 21 '19 at 16:53

4 Answers4