Get Video-Duration with avconv via Python

Question

I need to get the duration of an Video for an application for Django. So I\'ll have to do this in python. But I\'m really a beginner in this. So it would be nice, if you can hel

Answer 1

From python documentation:

Warning

Use communicate() rather than .stdin.write, .stdout.read or .stderr.read to avoid deadlocks due to any of the other OS pipe buffers filling up and blocking the child process.

So you should really user communicate for that:

import subprocess
task = subprocess.Popen("avconv -i video.mp4 2>&1 | grep Duration | cut -d ' ' -f 4 | sed -r 's/([^\.]*)\..*/\1/'", shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
time = task.communicate()[0]
print time

That way you can also catch stderr message, if any.