How to get length of video file from console?

Question

Suppose we have video file some_video.

How to get length of it from a shell script (with mplayer/transcode/gstreamer/vlc/ffmpeg/whatever)?

VIDEO_LENGTH_IN_SECONDS=`ffmpeg .... -i some_video ... | grep -o .....`

Answer 1

Something similar to:

ffmpeg -i input 2>&1 | grep "Duration"| cut -d ' ' -f 4 | sed s/,//

This will deliver: HH:MM:SS.ms.

To convert into seconds (and retain the milliseconds), pipe into:

awk '{ split($1, A, ":"); print 3600*A[1] + 60*A[2] + A[3] }'

If you don't want the milliseconds, pipe into:

awk '{ split($1, A, ":"); split(A[3], B, "."); print 3600*A[1] + 60*A[2] + B[1] }'

Example: