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I have a bunch of small video files in a folder and I thought clicking on Properties of the folder would give me the total duration of all the video clips combined but it didn't. What is the simplest way to count the total time of many different clips in a folder? In the same folder I have some .srt files too.

Also, I use VLC player; is there a way to use it to solve my problem? I don't have Windows Media Player.

Win 7. IE 8.

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How comfortable are you with scripting? This solution would work, but you would need to tweak it a bit to get the total: stackoverflow.com/questions/1987648/… – EBGreen Feb 21 '12 at 21:21
If you select the items in the file browser, then in the bottom I can see the total length of the selected items. – Bernhard Feb 21 '12 at 21:24
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@Bernhard should be an answer not a comment. – Moab Feb 21 '12 at 21:51
@EBGreen I can't script at all. – verve Feb 21 '12 at 22:20
@Bernhard I tried this but I just get the total file size at the bottom! – verve Feb 21 '12 at 22:23
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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

As long as windows is able to read video metadata, right-clicking on them and going in Details does indeed show the total length. I just tested here on a combination of .MP4 and .WMV and it worked.

For windows to read video metadata properly, you may need to have Windows Media Player installed as well as appropriate codecs (using codec packs such as Shark007, K-Lite and CCCP is a good idea). Whether you can see thumbnails or not in Windows Explorer should give you an indication.

Other than that, you could use a media application that supports video and shows total time in playlists, such as Winamp.

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My files are .FLV and MPEG-4 plus some .srt files scattered in the folder I'm trying to check. Will it work on these? Hmm...two of the video files have thumbnails but the rest are a single sheet of white. – verve Feb 22 '12 at 8:35
No. Windows Explorer cannot read FLV metadata. – iglvzx Feb 22 '12 at 8:38
@verve I'm not sure about FLV. Maybe not as per iglvzx. As for SRT, they are subtitle files so there are no video or durations on those. – mtone Feb 22 '12 at 16:17
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You can use Cygwin/Mingw and Mplayer (for Windows too):

$ mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -identify -msglevel all=0 How\ fast.ogg | grep ^ID_LENGTH
ID_LENGTH=30.58
$
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What's the stuff in the grey window? – verve Feb 21 '12 at 22:21
Example usage of mplayer from a Bash prompt in the Cygwin terminal. Lines starting with "$" are commands and lines without "$" are output. The third line is there to show you that the command only outputs one line, which means you can easily parse and sum it with other durations. – Janus Troelsen Feb 21 '12 at 23:34
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If you select the items in the file browser, then in the bottom I can see the total length of the selected items.

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Install this extension in VLC. It works like a charm.

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