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Comment by abdusco | Hacker News Reader

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}'

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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.

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