Determine duration of uploaded media file

styx66

I'm setting up a site where users can upload various media file types(starting with just WMA for now), and their info is stored in a database and displayed on a browse page. Rather than have users enter a duration, i was wondering if anybody could think of a way to determine the duration of the file being uploaded by opening it and reading its contents.

All i'd really need is the bitrate information, which, at least in .wma, is stored early in the header of the file, from what i can see in notepad:

...ARÑ†1Ð£¤  ÉHö     W i n d o w s   M e d i a   A u d i o   9 . 1   "   4 8   k b p s ,   4 4   k H z ,   m o n o   1 - p a s s   C B R    a¡Ü«ŒG©ÏŽä ...

I guess i could parse the file until i hit a certain string type and go back and read it to a var, but i'm still pretty new to php at least, and not sure how to go about it.

Also looking for an easier way 🙂

If anyone could help, it'd be much appreciated!

etully

Start Here: http://www.raditha.com/php/upload.php

Since the script is able to tell the percentage of the file that has been uploaded already, it's not too hard to record a timestamp when the upload starts. Then, every time the progress bar is updated, you can recalculate the bps and KBps rates.

The last time I looked at this, I remember the Perl version being easier to work with. Your mileage may vary.

styx66

thanks for the info, but i'm not sure thats what i'm lookin for.

i'm not looking to see the duration of the upload, but the actual duration of the media file when played.

by looking for that bitrate information in the file, i could approximate its playing time. the duration info is stored in there too somewhere i think, but i haven't found it yet.

etully

Sorry, my mistake, I completely misunderstood. Take a look at FFMpeg. It can gather tons of information about media files including the total duration of the file. It can read many many file formats but I seem to remember that it had trouble reading a few proprietary codecs so you might need to install an extra codec module to expand FFMpeg's ability to read the formats you need.