hachoir-metadata program¶

The hachoir-metadata program is a tool to extract metadata from multimedia files: videos, pictures, sounds, archives, etc. It supports most common file formats:

Archives: bzip2, gzip, zip, tar
Audio: MPEG audio (“MP3”), WAV, Sun/NeXT audio, Ogg/Vorbis (OGG), MIDI, AIFF, AIFC, Real audio (RA)
Image: BMP, CUR, EMF, ICO, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIFF, WMF, XCF
Misc: Torrent
Program: EXE
Video: ASF format (WMV video), AVI, Matroska (MKV), Quicktime (MOV), Ogg/Theora, Real media (RM)

Features:

Gtk interface
Plugins for Nautilus (Gnome) and Konqueror (KDE)
Support invalid / truncated files
Unicode compliant (charset ISO-8859-XX, UTF-8, UTF-16), convert string to your terminal charset
Remove duplicate values and if a string is a substring of another, just keep the longest one
Set priority to value, so it’s possible to filter metadata (option –level)
Only depends on [[hachoir-parser|hachoir-parser]] (and not on libmatroska, libmpeg2, libvorbis, etc.)

It tries to give as much information as possible. For some file formats, it gives more information than libextractor for example, such as the RIFF parser, which can extract creation date, software used to generate the file, etc. But hachoir-metadata cannot guess informations. The most complex operation is just to compute duration of a music using frame size and file size.

hachoir-metadata has three modes:

classic mode: extract metadata, you can use –level=LEVEL to limit quantity of information to display (and not to extract)
--type: show on one line the file format and most important informations
--mime: just display file MIME type

The command hachoir-metadata --mime works like file --mime, and hachoir-metadata --type like file. But today file command supports more file formats then hachoir-metadata.

Example¶

Example on AVI video (RIFF file format):

$ hachoir-metadata pacte_des_gnous.avi
Common:
- Duration: 4 min 25 sec
- Comment: Has audio/video index (248.9 KB)
- MIME type: video/x-msvideo
- Endian: Little endian
Video stream:
- Image width: 600
- Image height: 480
- Bits/pixel: 24
- Compression: DivX v4 (fourcc:"divx")
- Frame rate: 30.0
Audio stream:
- Channel: stereo
- Sample rate: 22.1 KHz
- Compression: MPEG Layer 3

Supported file formats¶

Total: 33 file formats.

Archive¶

bzip2: bzip2 archive
cab: Microsoft Cabinet archive
gzip: gzip archive
mar: Microsoft Archive
tar: TAR archive
zip: ZIP archive

Audio¶

aiff: Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF)
mpeg_audio: MPEG audio version 1, 2, 2.5
real_audio: Real audio (.ra)
sun_next_snd: Sun/NeXT audio

Container¶

matroska: Matroska multimedia container
ogg: Ogg multimedia container
real_media: !RealMedia (rm) Container File
riff: Microsoft RIFF container

Image¶

bmp: Microsoft bitmap (BMP) picture
gif: GIF picture
ico: Microsoft Windows icon or cursor
jpeg: JPEG picture
pcx: PC Paintbrush (PCX) picture
png: Portable Network Graphics (PNG) picture
psd: Photoshop (PSD) picture
targa: Truevision Targa Graphic (TGA)
tiff: TIFF picture
wmf: Microsoft Windows Metafile (WMF)
xcf: Gimp (XCF) picture

Misc¶

ole2: Microsoft Office document
pcf: X11 Portable Compiled Font (pcf)
torrent: Torrent metainfo file
ttf: !TrueType font

Program¶

exe: Microsoft Windows Portable Executable

Video¶

asf: Advanced Streaming Format (ASF), used for WMV (video) and WMA (audio)
flv: Macromedia Flash video
mov: Apple !QuickTime movie

Command line options¶

Modes –mime and –type¶

Option --mime ask to just display file MIME type:

$ hachoir-metadata --mime logo-Kubuntu.png sheep_on_drugs.mp3 wormux_32x32_16c.ico
logo-Kubuntu.png: image/png
sheep_on_drugs.mp3: audio/mpeg
wormux_32x32_16c.ico: image/x-ico

(it works like UNIX “file –mime” program)

Option --type display short description of file type:

$ hachoir-metadata --type logo-Kubuntu.png sheep_on_drugs.mp3 wormux_32x32_16c.ico
logo-Kubuntu.png: PNG picture: 331x90x8 (alpha layer)
sheep_on_drugs.mp3: MPEG v1 layer III, 128.0 Kbit/sec, 44.1 KHz, Joint stereo
wormux_32x32_16c.ico: Microsoft Windows icon: 16x16x32

(it works like UNIX “file” program)

Filter metadatas with –level¶

hachoir-metadata is a too much verbose by default:

$ hachoir-metadata logo-Kubuntu.png
Image:
- Image width: 331
- Image height: 90
- Bits/pixel: 8
- Image format: Color index
- Creation date: 2006-05-26 09:41:46
- Compression: deflate
- MIME type: image/png
- Endian: Big endian

You can skip useless information (here, only until level 7):

$ hachoir-metadata --level=7 logo-Kubuntu.png
Image:
- Image width: 331
- Image height: 90
- Bits/pixel: 8
- Image format: Color index
- Creation date: 2006-05-26 09:41:46
- Compression: deflate

Example to get most importation informations (level 3):

$ hachoir-metadata --level=3 logo-Kubuntu.png
Image:
- Image width: 331
- Image height: 90
- Bits/pixel: 8
- Image format: Color index

Getting help: –help¶

Use --help option to get full option list.

Metadata examples¶

hachoir-metadata (version 0.10) output examples.

Video¶

AVI¶

Common:

Duration: 1 hour 38 min 4 sec
Image width: 576
Image height: 240
Frame rate: 25.0 fps
Bit rate: 989.9 Kbit/sec
Producer: Nandub v1.0rc2
Comment: Has audio/video index (5.7 MB)
MIME type: video/x-msvideo
Endian: Little endian

Video stream:

Duration: 1 hour 38 min 4 sec
Image width: 576
Image height: 240
Bits/pixel: 24
Compression: XviD MPEG-4 (fourcc:”xvid”)
Frame rate: 25.0 fps

Audio stream:

Duration: 1 hour 38 min 4 sec
Channel: stereo
Sample rate: 44.1 kHz
Compression: MPEG Layer 3
Bit rate: 128.0 Kbit/sec

WMV¶

Common:

Title: 欽ちゃん＆香取慎吾の全日本仮装大賞
Author: Nippon Television Network Corporation[[NTV]
Duration: 1 min 47 sec 258 ms
Creation date: 2003-06-16 07:57:23.235000
Copyright: [C]]Nippon Television Network Corporation[NTV] 2003
Bit rate: 276.9 Kbit/sec (max)
Comment: Is seekable
MIME type: video/x-ms-wmv
Endian: Little endian

Audio stream !#1:

Channel: stereo
Sample rate: 8.0 kHz
Bits/sample: 16 bits
Compression: Windows Media Audio V7 / V8 / V9
Bit rate: 13.0 Kbit/sec

Video stream !#1:

Image width: 200
Image height: 150
Bits/pixel: 24
Compression: Windows Media Video V7
Bit rate: 16.3 Kbit/sec

Video stream !#2:

Image width: 200
Image height: 150
Bits/pixel: 24
Compression: Windows Media Video V7
Bit rate: 36.3 Kbit/sec

Video stream !#3:

Image width: 200
Image height: 150
Bits/pixel: 24
Compression: Windows Media Video V7
Bit rate: 211.3 Kbit/sec

MKV¶

Common:

Duration: 17 sec 844 ms
Creation date: 2006-08-16 11:04:36
Producer: mkvmerge v1.7.0 (‘What Do You Take Me For’) built on Jun 7 2006 08:33:28
Producer: libebml v0.7.7 + libmatroska v0.8.0
MIME type: video/x-matroska
Endian: Big endian

Video stream:

Language: French
Image width: 384
Image height: 288
Compression: V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC

Audio stream:

Title: travail = aliénation (extrait)
Language: French
Channel: mono
Sample rate: 44.1 kHz
Compression: A_VORBIS

FLV¶

Common:

Duration: 46 sec 942 ms
Bit rate: 287.4 Kbit/sec
Producer: !YouTube, Inc.
Producer: !YouTube Metadata Injector.
Format version: Macromedia Flash video version 1
MIME type: video/x-flv
Endian: Big endian

Metadata:

Channel: mono
Sample rate: 22.1 kHz
Bits/sample: 16 bits
Compression: MPEG-2 layer III, 64.0 Kbit/sec, 22.1 kHz

Metadata:

Compression: Sorensen H.263

Audio¶

MP3¶

Metadata:

Title: 07. motorbike
Author: Sheep On Drugs
Album: Bilmusik vol 1. Stainless Steel Providers
Duration: 1 sec 301 ms
Music genre: Car music
Track number: 7
Track total: 13
Channel: Joint stereo
Sample rate: 44.1 kHz
Bits/sample: 16 bits
Compression rate: 11.0x
Creation date: 2003
Bit rate: 128.0 Kbit/sec (constant)
Comment: Stainless Steel Provider is compilated to the car of Twinstar.
Format version: MPEG version 1 layer III
MIME type: audio/mpeg
Endian: Big endian

Ogg Vorbis¶

Common:

Title: La mouche
Album: Dans le caillou
Duration: 2 min 59 sec 893 ms
Music genre: Chanson
Track number: 6
Artist: Karpatt
Creation date: 2004
Producer: Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20050304
MIME type: audio/vorbis
Endian: Little endian

Audio:

Channel: stereo
Sample rate: 44.1 kHz
Compression: Vorbis
Bit rate: 128.0 Kbit/sec
Format version: Vorbis version 0

Picture¶

JPEG¶

Common:

Image width: 2048
Image height: 1536
Image orientation: Horizontal (normal)
Bits/pixel: 24
Pixel format: YCbCr
Compression rate: 15.5x
Camera aperture: 3
Camera focal: 2.8
Camera exposure: 1/60.1
Camera model: E3100
Camera manufacturer: NIKON
Compression: JPEG (Baseline)
Producer: E3100v1.2
Comment: JPEG quality: 85%
Format version: JFIF 1.01
MIME type: image/jpeg
Endian: Big endian

PNG¶

Metadata:

Image width: 331
Image height: 90
Bits/pixel: 32
Pixel format: RGBA
Compression rate: 12.0x
Creation date: 2006-05-26 09:41:46
Compression: deflate
MIME type: image/png
Endian: Big endian

ICO¶

Common:

MIME type: image/x-ico
Endian: Little endian

Icon !#1 (16x16):

Image width: 16
Image height: 16
Bits/pixel: 32
Compression rate: 0.9x
Compression: Uncompressed (RGB)

Archive¶

CAB¶

Common:

Compression: LZX (level 16)
Comment: 1 folders, 6 files
Format version: Microsoft Cabinet version 0x0103
MIME type: application/vnd.ms-cab-compressed
Endian: Little endian

File “fontinst.inf”:

File name: fontinst.inf
File size: 64 bytes
Creation date: 1998-11-10 16:09:52

File “Georgiaz.TTF”:

File name: Georgiaz.TTF
File size: 155.1 KB
File attributes: archive
Creation date: 1998-11-10 14:00:02

File “Georgiab.TTF”:

File name: Georgiab.TTF
File size: 136.3 KB
File attributes: archive
Creation date: 1998-11-10 14:00:02

Misc¶

TTF¶

Metadata:

Title: !DejaVu Serif
Author: !DejaVu fonts team
Version: 2.7
Creation date: 2006-07-06 17:29:52
Last modification: 2006-07-06 17:29:52
Copyright: !http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/License
URL: !http://dejavu.sourceforge.net
Comment: Smallest readable size in pixels: 8 pixels
Comment: Font direction: Mixed directional
MIME type: application/octet-stream
Endian: Big endian

EXE (PE)¶

Metadata:

Title: EULA
Author: Dell Inc
Version: 1.00
Creation date: 2006-08-09 03:23:10
Comment: CPU: Intel 80386
Comment: Subsystem: Windows/GUI
Format version: Portable Executable: Windows application
MIME type: application/x-dosexec
Endian: Little endian

Torrent¶

Metadata:

File name: debian-31r4-i386-binary-1.iso
File size: 638.7 MB
Creation date: 2006-11-16 21:44:37
URL: !http://bttracker.acc.umu.se:6969/announce
Comment: “Debian CD from cdimage.debian.org”
Comment: Piece length: 512.0 KB
MIME type: application/x-bittorrent
Endian: Little endian

hachoir-metadata program¶

Example¶

Supported file formats¶

Archive¶

Audio¶

Container¶

Image¶

Misc¶

Program¶

Video¶

Command line options¶

Modes –mime and –type¶

Filter metadatas with –level¶

Getting help: –help¶

See also¶

Used by¶

Informations¶

Libraries¶

Programs¶

Programs using metadata¶

Metadata examples¶

Video¶

AVI¶

WMV¶

MKV¶

FLV¶

Audio¶

MP3¶

Ogg Vorbis¶

Picture¶

JPEG¶

PNG¶

ICO¶

Archive¶

CAB¶

Misc¶

TTF¶

EXE (PE)¶

Torrent¶