How do you calculate the duration/length of an mp4 video using php?

Question

How do you get/calculate the duration/length of an mp4 video with php?

I tried using this but it only works for f4v. :< Can you help me with the mp4 case ?

possible duplicate of [How to extract duration time from ffmpeg output?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6239350/how-to-extract-duration-time-from-ffmpeg-output) — Daniel, Feb 28 '14 at 22:36

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 02 '11 at 17:51

4

I could not get tandu's solution working.

Here's what eventually worked for me:

$ffmpeg_output = shell_exec("ffmpeg -i \"$file\" 2>&1");
if( preg_match('/.*Duration: ([0-9:]+).*/', $ffmpeg_output, $matches) ) {
    echo $matches[1];
} else {
    echo "$file failed\n";
}

Hope this helps someone.

answered Dec 02 '11 at 17:51

Henno

1,448
4
18
30

Simple and perfect. Thanks for posting @Henno – Radhakrishna Sep 08 '15 at 06:37
This can result in 0 second durations. As ffmpeg will also return milliseconds. So the output is like this: **00:00:05.66** and the regex above will ignore decimal **00:00:05**. What you need is: `/.*Duration: ((\d+)(?:\:)(\d+)(?:\:)(\d+))*/i`. – Kalle H. Väravas Sep 22 '17 at 20:28

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 12 '11 at 09:26

2

I've also wanted to do this recently. I did a lot of research on it, and there is no native way in php. One suggestion is ffmpeg-php, but it did not appear to work for me. Another method is to use the command line ffmpeg:

exec("ffmpeg -i \"{$videofile}\" 2>&1");
$search='/Duration: (.*?),/';
$duration=preg_match($search, $duration, $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE, 3);

answered Feb 12 '11 at 09:26

Explosion Pills

188,624
52
326
405

I created a php class based on this approach: https://github.com/bfanger/sledgehammer_ffmpeg/blob/master/classes/FFVideo.php – Bob Fanger Feb 12 '11 at 09:33

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 28 '11 at 11:45

This can be done in pure php by using the php-reader library. This library is a full implementation of the ISO Base Media File Format, or ISO/IEC 14496-12 in pure php. Then you can either trust the metadata header for the duration, or calculate it yourself based on the stbl boxes.

How do you calculate the duration/length of an mp4 video using php?

3 Answers3