Go CLI to calculate total media duraton in directories | Hacker News Reader

Go CLI to calculate total media duraton in directories

github.com

19 pointsmddysr15 comments

What are the possible use cases for this tool? Why would I want to find out the total runtime of all videos in a directory?

Also, you might wanna limit concurrency[0] instead of spawning many ffprobe instances at the ~same time.

[0]: https://github.com/sourcegraph/conc

In another note, ChatGPT suggests this shell command to do the same thing. It doesn't process files in parallel though.

    find . -name "*.mp4" -print0 | \
      xargs -0 -I {} ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 {} | \
      awk '{sum += $1} END {print sum}'

Simply adding the `-P 10` flag to xargs will make it run 10 (or however many processes you want) in parallel.

One use case is that if you have a folder of (presumably legitimately acquired, or you know what I mean) movie files, you can figure out how long it will take you to finish them. Although number of video files * 2 hours/file is also likely a very good estimate.

Although I seriously doubt data hoarders care about that. A movie will be eventually watched someday. If they run out of space, they'll get another drive. Storage is cheap.

>Why would I want to find out the total runtime of all videos in a directory?

You wanna know how long will it take you to finish that lecture playlist you just downloaded. You're a teacher and want to show some videos but you're limited in time. You want to know how many hours of music you've got.

This way it will output time in H:MM:SS

    find . -type f -print0 | \
      xargs -0 -I {} ffprobe -v quiet -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 {} | \
      awk '{s += $1} END {printf "%d:%.2d:%.2d\n", s/3600, s%3600/60, s%3600%60}'

i am checking the `conc` package. thanks for the suggestion :) As for the too use cases, I made it primarily to see how long a playlist or a course will take me to complete, but it can be used for other scenarios i guess.

Off topic question: I saw in the gif that you use arabic directory names. Would it be more convenient for you to have a RTL terminal than a LTR? Never thought about this, also don't know if this is a dumb question.

In Python: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17185348/how-to-get-avi-...

As long as we're golfing: In PowerShell, using my personal script library:

    F:films> ls -rec -file | gec video | gvi | ndur
    372:18:09

where:

- `ls -rec -file` gets all files recursively under CWD (F:films)

- `gec video` selects video files via extension (gec -> Get-ExtensionCategory)

- `gvi` uses FFPROBE to get video info in custom object (gvi -> Get-VideoInfo)

- `ndur` sums Duration property of objects and converts seconds to 'hhh:mm:ss'

Most people I've shown this have found the syntax and aliases confusing and non-intuitive. They prefer the find/xargs/awk incantations, which, I'm told, are more elegant, correct and precise. After that, I'm usually speechless.

>using my personal script library

That's like those hacking scenes where they do:

  $ ./hack

Are those `gec`, `gvi`, certainly `ndur` isn't, part of pwsh default installation? If not how much works it needs to implement them? You may quickly find out why peeps prefer the Unix incantations. (Also will assume only one of those two approaches come with manuals for commands run.)

These are all my scripts. They're object-oriented, self-documented, tab-completable and a `hg clone` away. They're simply more polished versions of what I could do on Windows with built-in PowerShell (and FFPROBE of course):

    F:films> filter probe_format {
        ffprobe $_.fullname -v error -show_entries format=duration -of json |
            convertfrom-json | % format
    }
    F:films> ls -file -rec | ? extension -in .mp4,.avi,.mkv | probe_format |
        measure -sum duration | % { New-TimeSpan -Seconds $_.sum } | % tostring
    15.12:18:09  # same result as before (15days+12hours, etc.)

Even this makes much more sense to me than the Unix equivalent. I realize that Bash/AWK was better than CMD.EXE batch files, but, come on...

That looks pretty nice actually. But can be said the extra need to output and convert from json to object format introduce an extra complexity compared to the similar bash and fam command. Otherwise can see how the others parts (listing all files and choosing by extension, summing up a specific field from the output) can be more intuitive.

Azmena let's you show total duration of media files in directories and sub-directories.

Title is misspelled, it should be “duration”.

my bad. blame anxiety :)

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