Utility for Reading Detailed Video Header

btbx · 06-11-2008, 03:09 PM

I need a small utility that can read detailed technical information on the header of a video / multimedia file: What codec, resolutions, decompression etc.

The output will be text mode / console.

The utility should be able to tell the differences between:

* mpeg4 - ISO standard MPEG-4 (DivX 5, XVID compatible)
* msmpeg4 - pre-standard MPEG-4 variant by MS, v3 (aka DivX3)
* msmpeg4v2 - pre-standard MPEG-4 by MS, v2 (used in old asf files)

What is the name of such utility?
Thank you.

MS3FGX · 06-11-2008, 05:09 PM

I don't know of any stand-alone utility to do this, but looking at the output of MPlayer will show you all of the pertinent video information. You can instruct MPlayer to not play any audio or video, and just let it print out the file info and exit.

btbx · 06-12-2008, 08:09 AM

I had created a single script line.
Is there any correction /improvement for this script?

Content of videoheader.sh

mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 "$1" |grep -i '\['

unSpawn · 06-12-2008, 08:48 AM

Only that you should get rid of stderr and you don't need case sensitivity here.

You said "small" and 'mediainfo' is decidedly smaller than 'mplayer'. I edited out the second mplayer line as I realise it shows exactly the same output the 'mediainfo' line below shows. So if you like easily parsable output but don't want to install another utility then you could use 'mplayer -noquiet -v -identify -nocache -vo null -ss 99999 file 2>/dev/null| grep -i "^id_[av]"'.

Code:

]$ mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 file 2>/dev/null|grep -i '\['
VIDEO:  [DIV3]  576x304  24bpp  23.976 fps  804.9 kbps (98.3 kbyte/s)
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffdivx] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg DivX ;-) (MS MPEG-4 v3))
Opening audio decoder: [mp3lib] MPEG layer-2, layer-3
Selected audio codec: [mp3] afm: mp3lib (mp3lib MPEG layer-2, layer-3)
AO: [null] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)

Code:

]$ mediainfo file 2>/dev/null| grep -i "^id_[av]"
ID_VIDEO_ID=0
ID_AUDIO_ID=1
ID_VIDEO_FORMAT=DIV3
ID_VIDEO_BITRATE=804904
ID_VIDEO_WIDTH=576
ID_VIDEO_HEIGHT=304
ID_VIDEO_FPS=23.976
ID_VIDEO_ASPECT=0.0000
ID_AUDIO_FORMAT=85
ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=128176
ID_AUDIO_RATE=0
ID_AUDIO_NCH=0
ID_VIDEO_CODEC=ffdivx
ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=32000
ID_AUDIO_RATE=48000
ID_AUDIO_NCH=2
ID_AUDIO_CODEC=mp3