[Techtalk] video, audio codecs

Little Girl littlergirl at gmail.com
Sat Sep 24 19:38:30 UTC 2011


Hey there,

Miriam English wrote:

> Like most people I have built up, over the years, a collection of
> videos -- personal videos, quirky stuff from online, science
> videos, my re-encoded DVDs (I keep my fragile DVDs as archives). I
> have no problem viewing these on my computer, but if I want to use
> a standalone video player I've found they're very restricted in the
> codecs they will recognise. So it would be nice to be easily able
> to tell if a file will play or if I need to re-encode it.

I agree that this would be a valuable tool. I have some old videos
that I haven't yet figured out the codecs for. (:

> By the way my simple script is:
> 
> #! /bin/sh
> cd "$1"
> for f in *
> do
>    echo "$f"
>    mplayer "$f" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep
> "audio codec:"
>    mplayer "$f" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep
> "VIDEO:" echo
> done

I would love to try this, but can't tell what the "waffle" characters
are representing. Can you attach it as a text file?

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.


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