**This is an old revision of the document!**
video-meta
Mike Schilli's perl script to show metadata on a video file is a helpful “video forensics” tool that invokes the Video::FrameGrab module which in turn invokes mplayer. This tool can quickly help a video artist determine codecs, frame sizes, bitrates, frame rates and other properties of video clips at a glance. The installation is easy but unique in that it involves perl, which has its own way of installing modules. It also depends upon yaml, available from SlackBuilds.org
- Install the video::framegrab perl module with the command:
$ su -c “perl -MCPAN -e 'install Video::FrameGrab'”
- Install the data::dump perl module with the command:
$ su -c “perl -MCPAN -e 'install Data::Dump'”
- The script video-meta itself requires no installation, although the initial line of the script needs modifying so that the script can find perl on the system.
$ wget ftp://linuxmagazin.de/pub/magazin/2010/01/Perl/video-meta -O video-meta.pl $ sed “1s#/local##” video-meta.pl > video-meta $ chmod +x video-meta $ su -c 'cp video-meta /usr/local/bin/'
The script can then be used by simply invoking it before the name of a video file, such as: video-meta foo.avi, which will list all metadata attributes associated with foo.avi
Mediainfo
Providing you with even more information about media is mediainfo and mediainfo-gui. Obviously one works in the shell and one with a GUI. The amount of useful information provided by mediainfo is unparalleled, and so it should be on every multimedia artist's system.
Installation of mediainfo and its dependency libmediainfo can be done easily through slackbuilds.org