Get duration of an uploaded audio/video file

Question

I want to get the duration of audio/video files that are being uploaded into the system. Earlier I had used hachoir-metadata, but it's not maintained anymore I guess, as there is no python 3 compatible module for that.

IS there any other light weight alternative to it?
In case if I wish to write something of my own to do it, what would be the prerequisites?

If you have ffmpeg installed you can use ffprobe, as shown in [this answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/31025482/4014959); it should work on any audio or video file that ffmpeg supports, which is just about everything. — PM 2Ring, Jan 18 '16 at 07:03

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 18 '16 at 07:08

1

if you know about ffmpeg, you can use ffmpeg to read the audio or video, it will output the duration of audio or video

$ ffmpeg -i  "Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know (feat. Kimbra) - official video.mp4" 2>&1 | grep -E -o "Duration: \S+" 
Duration: 00:04:03.90,

answered Jan 18 '16 at 07:08

Hackaholic

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Got this `*** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED *** This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead.` after trying it. So tried, avconv it works – Rajesh Yogeshwar Jan 18 '16 at 07:36
thanks for ffmpeg answer led me to a working solution. ;) – Rajesh Yogeshwar Jan 18 '16 at 07:50
@RajeshYogeshwar, if that works for you , you can accept my answer. – Hackaholic Jan 18 '16 at 08:50
@RajeshYogeshwar: FWIW, that deprecation warning is a little misleading. See [the Wikipedia article on Libav](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libav) for details. – PM 2Ring Jan 18 '16 at 09:17
@PM2Ring Thanks for the link, I saw the deprecation warning hence mentioned it and went ahead with avconv – Rajesh Yogeshwar Jan 18 '16 at 15:18

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:22

For anyone looking for this particular thing, follow following steps:

Make sure you have libav-tools package installed. You can check it by typing and trying to execute avconv command. If not present, do sudo apt-get install libav-tools
Then, try this command ffmpeg -i myvideo 2>&1 | grep Duration | cut -d ' ' -f 4 | sed s/,// (I found this command here).
If you want to use it in python script, you can probably use subprocess module to your effect

Correct me if I am wrong somewhere

Get duration of an uploaded audio/video file

2 Answers2