How can I get a video durations via node-fluent-ffmpeg?

Question

I have not found an API to get the duration of a video, does anyone know that?

Answer 1

Using ffprobe via fluent ffmpeg is perfect for this:

const ffmpeg = require('fluent-ffmpeg');
ffmpeg.ffprobe(videoFile, (error, metadata) => {
 const duration = metadata.format?.duration;
 console.log(duration);
});

Just make sure you've installed ffprobe, including it in your ffmpeg build.

The fluent ffmpeg docs also outline an approach using ffprobe as a method as part of your encoding function, but if you're doing that you need to make sure you're not streaming your source in, as it will be consumed by the ffprobe process, so for streaming I would recommend simply dedicating a few lines to ffprobe to obtain the duration, as above.

• Marc: const duration = metadata.format.duration; TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'format')
• Chris: @Marc Was ffprobe definitely installed? Can always log out the entire metadata object to see what you get. And could check if there's an error returned too, before you try to parse the metadata object.
• NotSimon: What's the reason for this returning N/A? All other data in the metadata is returned successfully, so I assume ffprobe is installed properly
• Chris: @NotSimon For the duration? Could be that the metadata is not available for that particular encoding format, as is often the case with streamed formats.