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audiovideoffmpegffprobeavprobe

Find if video file has audio present in it

I'm trying to figure out if a video has audio present in it so as to extract the mp3 using ffmpeg. When the video contains no audio channels, ffmpeg creates an empty mp3 file which I'm using to figure out if audio was present in the video in the first place. I'm sure there is a better way to identify if audio is present in a video. Will avprobe help with this? Can anyone point me to a resource or probably a solution?

Edit: Surprisingly, the same command on my server running the latest build of ffprobe doesn't run. It throws an error saying

Unrecognized option 'select_stream'

Failed to set value 'a' for option 'select_stream'

Any ideas how to rectify this out?

Solution

  • I would use FFprobe (it comes along with FFMPEG):

    ffprobe -i INPUT -show_streams -select_streams a -loglevel error

    In case there's no audio it ouputs nothing. If there is an audio stream then you get something like:

    [STREAM]

    index=0

    codec_name=mp3

    codec_long_name=MP3 (MPEG audio layer 3)

    profile=unknown

    codec_type=audio

    codec_time_base=1/44100

    etc

    etc...

    [/STREAM]

    That should be easy enough to parse regardless of the language you're using to make this process automated.