[MPlayer-users] getting info from video files

[rcooley]

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003 12:17:13 +0100 (MET)
"Kevin Eilers" <Eilers.Kevin at gmx.net> wrote:

> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read
> DOCS/bugreports.html] hi!
> 
> i'm looking for a program that extracts information about resolution,
> audiocodec etc. from video files, because i'm trying to write a script
> that automates the startup of mplayer and changes the aspect ratio to
> fit my widescreen tv, 
I'm not sure what you mean here.  Could you elaborate?

> removes black bars from badly encoded videos

That's exactly what I do.  I have mplayer run cropdetect (I've modified
cropdetect to scale-down to the nearest width/height divisible by 16),
exit, and then use those crop numbers and start normal playback.  Works
nicely on DVDs with incredibly wide format, since I can hit the pan&scan
buttons to crop off the extreme edges.  Anyhow, moving on.

> is there any
> possibility of starting mplayer, getting the fileinfo, and then
> quitting again? 
Others have suggested '-identify', but the only output you get from
identify, that you couldn't get from parsing the normal mplayer output,
is the length.  So, if you don't need length, I wouldn't bother with
identify at all.

"-frames" is good advice, but if you are cropdetect-ing, you
don't want to use '0'.