[LAU] Retrieving audio info from a video file

[Jonathan Gazeley]

On 02/09/2010 10:38 AM, Emiliano Grilli wrote:
> Jonathan Gazeley<jonathan.gazeley at bristol.ac.uk>  writes:
>
>    
>> Hi all,
>>
>> This is slightly OT for the group, but I hope someone can tell me.
>>
>> I have thousands of large AVI files and I want a quick way to determine
>> from the command line whether their audio is stereo, 5.1, etc.
>>
>> I've read about ffmpeg and haven't seen anything jumping out at me, and
>> it's hard to pick the right search keywords to find relevant pages on
>> Google.
>>
>> Anyone know a trick to get this info? Currently I can do it by
>> right-clicking on the file and viewing its properties, but there *has*
>> to be a better way...
>>      
>
> maybe "mplayer -frame 0 -identify myfile.avi" ?
>
>
>    
>> Cheers,
>> Jonathan
>>      
> HTH
> Ciao
>
>    

Thanks for your advice. Unfortunately this seems to require a graphical 
machine, but I'm trying to run this on a headless fileserver that has 
all my media.

[jonathan at zeus ~]$ mplayer -frame 0 -identify movie.avi
Creating config file: /home/jonathan/.mplayer/config
Unknown option on the command line: -frame
Error parsing option on the command line: -frame
MPlayer SVN-r29701-4.4.1 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team

Any other ideas?

Many thanks,
Jonathan