Getting information about your video files

The other day, I wanted to find out which of the videos in my movie collection were encoded with multitrack (e.g. 5.1) sound.

I found a tool for Linux called themonospot. Happily, it’s packaged with Fedora and can be installed simply by doing

yum install themonospot-console

Once installed it’ll quickly give you information about your video files:

[jonathan@zeus ~]$ themonospot-console /media/public/Movies/Sunshine/Sunshine.avi
File path:               /media/public/Movies/Sunshine/Sunshine.avi
Codec name:              XVID
Codec desc:              xvid
Frame size:              704 x 288
Average video bitrate:   1,423 Kb/Sec
File size:               1,525,886 KB
Total time:              01:47:26.00 seconds
Frame rate:              24.00 frames/sec
Total frames:            154,574
Video data rate:         23 frames/sec
Video quality:           113
Packet Bitstream:        False
ISFT data:               VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.2 (build 2540/release)
JUNK data:               VirtualDubMod build 2540/release
USER data:               XviD0046
Audio 01:                0x2000 (AC3) 448.00 Kb/Sec - 48000 Hz (6 Channels)

As you can see, my copy of Sunshine has 6-channel audio (i.e. 5.1). But what if you want to run a batch job to check all of your films and see which ones have surround sound?

Then use perl.

I wrote an extremely hacky script that takes a path as an argument and whizzes round to fetch the encoding of all .avi or .AVI files in the directory. It prints the names of any that have more than 2 audio channels (i.e. better than stereo).

It sometimes goes wrong if the output of themonospot-console varies, as it occasionally does.

So you get output like this…

[jonathan@zeus ~]$ ./findAudioEncoding.pl /media/public/Movies/
/media/public/Movies/Catch Me If You Can/Catch Me If You Can.avi : 6
/media/public/Movies/National Treasure - Book of Secrets/National Treasure - Book of Secrets.avi : 6
/media/public/Movies/Never Been Kissed/Never Been Kissed.avi : 6
/media/public/Movies/Rescuers, The/Rescuers, The.avi : 5
Argument "" isn't numeric in numeric gt (>) at ./findAudioEncoding.pl line 12.
/media/public/Movies/Brideshead Revisited/Brideshead Revisited.avi : 5
/media/public/Movies/Passion of the Christ, The/Passion of the Christ, The.avi : 6

If you’re interested in the source, here it is.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# findAudioEncoding.pl

use strict;
my $path = $ARGV[0];
chomp (my @files = `find $path 2> /dev/null | grep -i .avi`);
foreach my $file (@files) {
        chomp (my $channels = `themonospot-console "$file" | grep "Audio 01" | awk ' { print $10 } '`);
        $channels =~ s/(//g;
        if ($channels > 2) {
                print "$file : $channelsn";
        }
}