package for basic examination of .dv video files?

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 07:20 -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Nov 2009 05:51:51 -0500 (EST)
> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> 
> > what i was
> > after was pulling together a collection of command-line utilities for
> > examining and converting video files of various formats, that's all.
> > apparently, i still have some research to do.
> 
> Don't worry, the research will never stop :-), but I find the
> mplayer/mencoder stuff from rpmfusion the most complete as far
> as supporting weird video formats. The 32 bit version can even
> load and run windows codecs, but that rarely seems necessary
> lately. Of course, mencoder is also the most complete in terms
> of the number of command line options, you can spend weeks
> playing with them. There is also a "midentify" script that
> just prints info about the file in the same spirit as tcprobe
> (but totally different format, of course).

And with even less of a manual than tcprobe.

Tcprobe is useful to see the length of the video, which midentify
doesn't seem to report.

I get the feeling all these things are written for people who already
know what they're doing :-) Even the tools with man pages are
masterpieces of obscurity.

poc