Format Video Length in HH:MM:SS from Command Line

By  on  

In my experimentation with audio and video manipulation, I've found that most tools prefer to handle time in HH:MM:SS (hour:minute:second) format.  I always presumed that using seconds would be easier but I'm barely a novice media tool user, much less a tool creator.

When I wrote the Create Short Preview from Video post, I calculated the video length in seconds with the following command:

length=$(ffprobe $sourcefile  -show_format 2>&1 | sed -n 's/duration=//p' | awk '{print int($0)}')]

That was helpful in detecting if a video was long enough to generate a preview for, but I then needed to get that length in HH:MM:SS format:

formattedlength=$(printf "%02d:%02d:%02d\n" $(($length/3600)) $(($length%3600/60)) $(($length%60)))

In the end you need to evaluate loads of individual statements to get your final HH:MM:SS format!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ElementSpy

    One part of MooTools I love is the ease of implementing events within classes. Just add Events to your Implements array and you can fire events anywhere you want -- these events are extremely helpful. ScrollSpy and many other popular MooTools plugins would...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!