I heard about Audioboo – a sort of Youtube for audio clips – the other day on BBC Click. I decided to give it a go, since I fairly often embed audio clips in my blog, simply by hosting and linking to MP3s and letting the user’s browser handle the playback. This doesn’t always work out for the best.
So here’s my first attempt at uploading content to Audioboo and embedding it in my blog.
The other day, I wanted to find out which of the videos in my movie collection were encoded with multitrack (e.g. 5.1) sound.
I found a tool for Linux called themonospot. Happily, it’s packaged with Fedora and can be installed simply by doing
yum install themonospot-console
Once installed it’ll quickly give you information about your video files:
[jonathan@zeus ~]$ themonospot-console /media/public/Movies/Sunshine/Sunshine.avi File path: /media/public/Movies/Sunshine/Sunshine.avi Codec name: XVID Codec desc: xvid Frame size: 704 x 288 Average video bitrate: 1,423 Kb/Sec File size: 1,525,886 KB Total time: 01:47:26.00 seconds Frame rate: 24.00 frames/sec Total frames: 154,574 Video data rate: 23 frames/sec Video quality: 113 Packet Bitstream: False ISFT data: VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.2 (build 2540/release) JUNK data: VirtualDubMod build 2540/release USER data: XviD0046 Audio 01: 0x2000 (AC3) 448.00 Kb/Sec - 48000 Hz (6 Channels)
As you can see, my copy of Sunshine has 6-channel audio (i.e. 5.1). But what if you want to run a batch job to check all of your films and see which ones have surround sound?
Then use perl.
I wrote an extremely hacky script that takes a path as an argument and whizzes round to fetch the encoding of all .avi or .AVI files in the directory. It prints the names of any that have more than 2 audio channels (i.e. better than stereo).
It sometimes goes wrong if the output of themonospot-console varies, as it occasionally does.
So you get output like this…
[jonathan@zeus ~]$ ./findAudioEncoding.pl /media/public/Movies/ /media/public/Movies/Catch Me If You Can/Catch Me If You Can.avi : 6 /media/public/Movies/National Treasure - Book of Secrets/National Treasure - Book of Secrets.avi : 6 /media/public/Movies/Never Been Kissed/Never Been Kissed.avi : 6 /media/public/Movies/Rescuers, The/Rescuers, The.avi : 5 Argument "" isn't numeric in numeric gt (>) at ./findAudioEncoding.pl line 12. /media/public/Movies/Brideshead Revisited/Brideshead Revisited.avi : 5 /media/public/Movies/Passion of the Christ, The/Passion of the Christ, The.avi : 6
If you’re interested in the source, here it is. If you find this useful, why not “like” my post? (The 
at the bottom)
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# findAudioEncoding.pl
use strict;
my $path = $ARGV[0];
chomp (my @files = `find $path 2> /dev/null | grep -i .avi`);
foreach my $file (@files) {
chomp (my $channels = `themonospot-console "$file" | grep \"Audio 01\" | awk \' { print \$10 } \'`);
$channels =~ s/\(//g;
if ($channels > 2) {
print "$file : $channels\n";
}
}