In our previous post How to get video metadata as JSON using ffmpeg/ffprobe we showed how to generate json-formatted output using ffprobe which comes bundled with ffmpeg.
Assuming ffprobe is installed, you can easily use this to obtain the duration of a video clip (say, in input.mp4) using Python:
import subprocess import json input_filename = "input.mp4" out = subprocess.check_output(["ffprobe", "-v", "quiet", "-show_format", "-print_format", "json", input_filename]) ffprobe_data = json.loads(out) duration_seconds = float(ffprobe_data["format"]["duration"]) # Example: duration_seconds = 11.6685
When writing such code, be aware of the risk of shell code injection if you don’t using subprocess correctly!