Get the duration of an audio or video file with ffprobe

Use ffprobe, grep and cut to list metadata of video.mp4 and ‘grep’ the duration value of the video.

The -select_streams parameter to ffprobe will select the specific stream you want to evaluate. Acceptable values are: a for audio, v for video and d for data.

Running the command without | grep "duration=" | cut -d '=' -f 2 will log to the screen all the metadata stored on the file container format. The data includes: width and height of the video, codec_name, codec_type, avg_frame_rate (fps), nb_frames (total number of frames) and more.

The following is a ffprobe dump of the file yoga.mp4.

[STREAM]
index=0
codec_name=h264
codec_long_name=H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10
profile=High
codec_type=video
codec_tag_string=avc1
codec_tag=0x31637661
width=1920
height=1080
coded_width=1920
coded_height=1080
closed_captions=0
film_grain=0
has_b_frames=2
sample_aspect_ratio=1:1
display_aspect_ratio=16:9
pix_fmt=yuv420p
level=40
color_range=unknown
color_space=unknown
color_transfer=unknown
color_primaries=unknown
chroma_location=left
field_order=progressive
refs=1
is_avc=true
nal_length_size=4
id=0x1
r_frame_rate=25/1
avg_frame_rate=25/1
time_base=1/12800
start_pts=0
start_time=0.000000
duration_ts=33792
duration=2.640000
bit_rate=1246051
max_bit_rate=N/A
bits_per_raw_sample=8
nb_frames=66
nb_read_frames=N/A
nb_read_packets=N/A
extradata_size=48
DISPOSITION:default=1
DISPOSITION:dub=0
DISPOSITION:original=0
DISPOSITION:comment=0
DISPOSITION:lyrics=0
DISPOSITION:karaoke=0
DISPOSITION:forced=0
DISPOSITION:hearing_impaired=0
DISPOSITION:visual_impaired=0
DISPOSITION:clean_effects=0
DISPOSITION:attached_pic=0
DISPOSITION:timed_thumbnails=0
DISPOSITION:captions=0
DISPOSITION:descriptions=0
DISPOSITION:metadata=0
DISPOSITION:dependent=0
DISPOSITION:still_image=0
TAG:language=eng
TAG:handler_name=Mainconcept MP4 Video Media Handler
TAG:vendor_id=[0][0][0][0]
[/STREAM]