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I'm writing some shell scripts that automatically convert some video files. Except I don't want to run the conversion on files that are already h264 encoded. Is there a way I can tell via a terminal command whether a video has a certain codec?

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2 Answers

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With ffmpeg : ffmpeg -i video_file

see : http://videotranscoding.wikispaces.com/GetVideoMetadata

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This won't work for .avi files (at least it didn't for one I tried), but for .mp4 or .mov files, it should.

To list a file's codecs:

$ mdls -name kMDItemCodecs "/path/to/some/file.mp4"
kMDItemCodecs = (
    "H.264",
    AAC
)

To find files that are movies, but don't have the H.264 codec:

mdfind "kMDItemContentTypeTree == 'public.movie' && kMDItemCodecs != '*H.264*'"
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Isn't that because Quicktime components don't ship any of the various AVI codecs? I imagine mdls is almost exclusively functional to the MPEG series of codecs and not much more. – Jason Salaz♦ Aug 16 '11 at 20:00
FWIW, QuickTime Player's Movie Inspector does list the AVI file's codecs. – Sören Kuklau Aug 16 '11 at 21:05
Good point :). That also goes in line with your public.movie != H.264 in your answer as well. – Jason Salaz♦ Aug 16 '11 at 21:14

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