How to calculate media files summary duration

For calculation media files summary duration in a specific directory, we need ffprobe and python

ffprobe is an open source software for gathering information from multimedia streams and could be downloaded from: https://ffmpeg.org/ffprobe.html

For getting the media file duration we need to execute next command:

ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "my-media-file.mp4"

Next we need to get full list of files in a directory recursevly:

import os

paths = [os.path.join(dp, f) for dp, dn, filenames in os.walk(dir) for f in filenames]

Next we need loop through each files and execute command above with ffprobe and get total duration in seconds:

import subprocess

summary_duration = 0.

for file in files:
    cmd =  'ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "{}"'.format(file)
    process = subprocess.run(cmd, shell=True, capture_output=True)
    if (not process.stderr):
        try:
            seconds = float(process.stdout.decode("utf-8"))
        except:
            pass

In above code we’re ignoring any errors in case if files are not in valid format or inaccessible.

Finally, we can beautify the seconds in more readable format:

import datetime

str(datetime.timedelta(seconds=int(summary_duration)))

The final code could be downloaded from Git repository:

https://github.com/SUXUMI/calculate-media-files-summary-duration

usage sample:

$ calculate-media-files-summary-duration.py my-directory-path