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When you take clips and turn them into computer playable files, whether .TS or .MOV or .MPG, .MP4, .VOB, etc., do you as the producer actually manually write into some field in a "Details" section of your video editor what the video length is, so that it can be read by the eventual user's video player? Or is this activity performed automatically by the video editor?
I'm asking because: when a mouse is passed over a file line item in Windows 7 Shell (Windows Explorer) a little box is displayed where the mouse meets the file line item and provides simple name and size properties, one of which (if it's a media file) is run length. How does that figure get there into the file (later to be read be Windows or OS X)?
Thanks for any info.
Thanks Synetech. I have another question: When you say it would be pointless to wait until the whole video has been processed to find out such a basic piece of information, do you mean waiting on the production writing side, or the end-user reading side? (Also, do you know if .TS file contains a total-length metadata field?) – user33666 – 2011-03-02T05:25:36.953
I mean on the end-user side. The production side should already know how long the video is. On the client side, finding out exactly how long the video is at the end of the video (ie by having the program run through the whole video before to calculate the length) would not be very useful. I don’t know about MPEG transport streams, but I’m sure it can be found out (I don’t believe the format is proprietary). I’ll see if I can find a format specification. – Synetech – 2011-03-02T22:54:32.933
Added a bit of extra info about some formats that use keyframes. – Synetech – 2011-03-02T23:02:33.473
Thank you Synetech. Where did you place the bit of extra info? – user33666 – 2011-03-06T19:15:18.960
You can see the revisions by clicking on the edited link: http://superuser.com/posts/252052/revisions
– Synetech – 2011-03-06T20:06:57.890