[Techtalk] video, audio codecs

[Miriam English]

hi folks,

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 can use the "properties" GUI of my ROX file manager to show info about 
the video, but this is slow and a hassle. I've managed to cobble 
together a simple script that lists the info using mplayer. It works, 
but it's not great. Does anybody know of a shell program that will do 
the job?

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


It gives output like this (but with the filenames colored red):

Annie_Oakley_shooting_glass_balls,_1894_video.ogm
VIDEO:  [theo]  320x240  0bpp  29.970 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)

my_niece_sophie_eyes.asf
Selected audio codec: [ffadpcmimawav] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg WAV IMA ADPCM 
audio)
VIDEO:  [M4S2]  320x240  24bpp  1000.000 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)

Thornton Grover - quantum entanglement.flv
Selected audio codec: [mp3] afm: mp3lib (mp3lib MPEG layer-2, layer-3)
VIDEO:  [VP6F]  320x240  0bpp  29.917 fps  409.6 kbps (50.0 kbyte/s)

TShirtFolding.mpg
Selected audio codec: [mp3] afm: mp3lib (mp3lib MPEG layer-2, layer-3)
VIDEO:  MPEG1  320x240  (aspect 1)  29.970 fps  608.0 kbps (76.0 kbyte/s)

water droplet bouncing on superhydrophobic carbon nanotube array.flv
Selected audio codec: [faad] afm: faad (FAAD AAC (MPEG-2/MPEG-4 Audio))
VIDEO:  [H264]  640x480  0bpp  59.750 fps  284.7 kbps (34.8 kbyte/s)



-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
-----
Website: http://miriam-english.org
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