detect video length in seconds

[garylinux]

Is there a way to get the length of a video clip (divix/xvid) in
seconds?
oh this is on linux. I first tryed to see if mplayer would tell me then
I could wrap the call in a popen object and be done but it does not
appear to output the length.
Now I am looking at pymedia .It would be nice if there was some actual
docmentation for it.

 

[Tim Roberts]

Is there a way to get the length of a video clip (divix/xvid) in
seconds?

This is non-trivial. MPEG files do not have an index, so the only way to
figure this out is to scan from the front of the file until you find a
timestamp, then scan backwards from the end of the file until you find a
timestamp, and subtract.

You can also try to extract the bitrate from an early header and use
arithmetic to get a good estimate.