Discussion: How to use ffprobe to retrieve duration?

[jay-ramani]

Not really an issue, but a question. Raising here, since there's no discussion tab.

How do I use this library to retrieve only the duration (while suppressing every other output) of a video stream (at index zero) to standard output with ffprobe? While we could achieve this with the Python subprocess module as below

subprocess.run(
	(
		"path_to_ffprobe",
		"-v",
		"quiet",
		"-select_streams",
		"v:0",
		"-show_entries",
		"format=duration",
		"-print_format",
		"default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1",
		"-i",
		input_file
	)
)

, this would require to know the path to ffprobe. I'm trying to achieve the above using a ffmpeg library without relying on an external path in my code.

Any tips and pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks and cheers.

[Nony6000]

I've done something similar for bit-depth using the ffmpeg._probe.probe module from this library:

import ffmpeg
import ffmpeg._probe

def get_bit_depth (input_path):
probe_result = ffmpeg._probe.probe(input_path)
for stream in probe_result.get("streams"):
if stream.get("codec_type") == "video"
profile = stream.get("profile")
print (profile)
return profile

This works since ffprobe returns a JSON format output, which, as far as I know, is automatically converted to Python dictionary format, so you use .get() to access and return the value you want. While I'm not sure which JSON key/subkey corresponds to the duration value you want, I'm unable to give you the code directly, but I hope this code sample will be a helpful reference. Let me know if it helps or if you have other questions.