Is there a way to use ffmpeg to determine the encoding of a file before transcoding?

Question

I am planning to use ffmpeg to ensure all video files uploaded to my website are encoded as mp4 h264.

Rather than automatically processing every file I would like t

Answer 1

Use ffprobe.

Example command

$ ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=codec_name -of default=nokey=1:noprint_wrappers=1 input.mp4

Result

h264

Option descriptions

• -v error Omit extra information except for fatal errors.

• -select_streams v:0 Select only the first video stream. Otherwise the codec_name for all other streams in the file, such as audio, will be shown as well.

• -show_entries stream=codec_name Only output the codec_name instead of all stream info.

• -of default=nokey=1:noprint_wrappers=1 Select the default output format style and omit the key and wrapper info. Otherwise, without these options, it will output:

  [STREAM]
  codec_name=h264
  [/STREAM]
  

Also see

• ffprobe documentation
• FFmpeg Wiki: FFprobe Tips

Answer 2

An alternative is to use ffprobe which is included with ffmpeg. The following will give the most terse output I can find from the ffmpeg tools:

ffprobe -hide_banner -stats -i myfile.avi

Answer 3

If you pass an input file to ffmpeg, without other parameters, it will give you information about the video source:

ffmpeg -i myfile.avi

Another way would be the -identify option of mplayer, which might be slightly easier to parse. There is a wrapper script midentify which gives you even better output. See this example.