Getting video dimension / resolution / width x height from ffmpeg

Question

How would I get the height and width of a video from ffmpeg\'s information output. For example, with the following output:

$ ffmpeg -i video.mp4         


        

Answer 1

As mentioned here, ffprobe provides a way of retrieving data about a video file. I found the following command useful ffprobe -v quiet -print_format json -show_streams input-video.xxx to see what sort of data you can checkout.

I then wrote a function that runs the above command and returns the height and width of the video file:

import subprocess
import shlex
import json

# function to find the resolution of the input video file
def findVideoResolution(pathToInputVideo):
    cmd = "ffprobe -v quiet -print_format json -show_streams"
    args = shlex.split(cmd)
    args.append(pathToInputVideo)
    # run the ffprobe process, decode stdout into utf-8 & convert to JSON
    ffprobeOutput = subprocess.check_output(args).decode('utf-8')
    ffprobeOutput = json.loads(ffprobeOutput)

    # find height and width
    height = ffprobeOutput['streams'][0]['height']
    width = ffprobeOutput['streams'][0]['width']

    return height, width