How to check how long a video (mp4) is using the shell?

Question

I need to ftp upload all the mp4 files in a directory with length > 4 minutes using the shell. I can't find any script to check how long a video is. Does anybody have any idea how to do that?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

This will give you the length of a video.

ffmpeg -i myvideo 2>&1 | grep Duration | cut -d ' ' -f 4 | sed s/,//

Answer 2

Mediainfo is a fast tool for this purpose:

$ mediainfo --Inform="Video;%Duration%"  [inputfile]

You can find more options in a more thorough answer.

In my tests, ffprobe takes 0.3 seconds and mediainfo takes 0.09 seconds.

Answer 3

exiftool (originally intended for reading camera metadata from image files, but later expanded to read and write metadata from almost any kind of media file) is very convenient to use for this. Run it with:

exiftool FILE.mp4 | grep Duration

You'll probably need to install exiftool first, but this is is easily done with the following command (on Debian and derivatives like Ubuntu etc.):

apt install libimage-exiftool-perl

Of course, this answer is just another alternative. Many of the other answers are good too. :)

Answer 4

You can try to use avconv command..

First you should to install:

if you type the command with the flag -i, you will get information about the video:

avconv -i test.mp4

In the output there is a field called Duration

avconv version 0.8.4-4:0.8.4-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the Libav developers
  built on Nov  6 2012 16:51:33 with gcc 4.6.3
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'test.mp4':

  Duration: 00:58:28.05, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 888 kb/s
    Stream #0.0(eng): Video: h264 (High), yuv420p, 720x404, 748 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 20k tbn, 50 tbc
    Stream #0.1(und): Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 127 kb/s

Now you can use the command to only get the value of the field Duration

Type:

avconv -i file.mp4 2>&1 | grep 'Duration' | awk '{print $2}' | sed s/,//

In my case the result is:

00:58:28.05

58 Minutes and 28.05 seconds.

Hope this will helpful!

Answer 5

Adding to pers solution, this can be used on an entire directory:

for f in *; do ffmpeg -i "$f" 2>&1 | grep Duration | cut -d " " -f 4 | sed s/,//  | tr -d "\n" && echo " $f"; done

it can even be extended by | sort to have the files sorted by their length.

you can add this to .bashrc or .bash_aliases in order to be able to do lsvlength | sort on a directory

alias lsvlength='for f in *; do ffmpeg -i "$f" 2>&1 | grep Duration | cut -d " " -f 4 | sed s/,//  | tr -d "\n" && echo " $f"; done'

Answer 6

Check all the videos in current folder with their names and lengths:

exiftool -T -Duration -FileName *

Prints:

0:01:38 vid1.mp4
0:09:54 vid2.mp4

Answer 7

ffprobe is more elegant solution than ffmpeg which throws an error if not given the output path.

ffprobe video.mp4 2>&1 | grep -E '^ +Duration' | cut -d':' -f2- | cut -d, -f1

Answer 8

Even simpler:

avprobe file.mp4 -show_format_entry duration

Answer 9

As you can see there are numerous ways to accomplish this: ffprobe mediafile -show_entries format=format=duration 2>&1 | grep DURATION where mediafile is the name of the file, will provide output similar to the below. The first being the duration of the first stream (typically video) and the second providing the duration of the second stream (typically audio)

  DURATION        : 00:21:40.132000000
  DURATION        : 00:21:40.062000000

A more succinct but slightly less accurate and resource intensive approach would be exiftool -T -Duration mediafile where mediafile is the name of the file, will provide output similar to the below.

00:21:40

Another good option is mediainfo --Inform="Video;%Duration/String3%" mediafile where mediafile is the name of the file, will provide output similar to the below.

00:21:40.132

Answer 10

If you want to see duration of some videos in a directory , you can use following command

exiftool * | grep ^Duration | cut -d' ' -f 26

Answer 11

The above answers are all great as long as you combine it with: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2181712/simple-way-to-convert-hhmmss-hoursminutesseconds-split-seconds-to-seconds To get something like:

for movie in *                                         
  do
  duration=$(ffmpeg -i $movie 2>&1 | grep Duration | cut -d ' ' -f 4 | sed -e 's/,//' -e 's/\.[0-9]*$//')
  duration_seconds=$(echo "$duration" | awk -F: '{ print ($1 * 3600) + ($2 * 60) + $3 }')
  if [ $duration_seconds -gt 240 ]; then
    echo "the movie $movie is longer than 4 minutes: $duration"
  else
    echo "the movie $movie is shorter than 4 minutes: $duration" 
  fi  
done                                                       
the movie a_short.mpg is shorter than 4 minutes: 00:03:06
the movie mlong_147309001.mov is longer than 4 minutes: 00:10:44

I wanted to post this as I came across this question, but none of the above provided the link/answer to H:M:S->testable shell threshold. Hope you have a great day!