Is there a way to use ffmpeg to determine the encoding of a file before transcoding?

Question

I am planning to use ffmpeg to ensure all video files uploaded to my website are encoded as mp4 h264.

Rather than automatically processing every file I would like t

Answer 1

An alternative is to use ffprobe which is included with ffmpeg. The following will give the most terse output I can find from the ffmpeg tools:

ffprobe -hide_banner -stats -i myfile.avi