hachoir-metadata extracts metadata from multimedia files: music, picture, video, but also archives. 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
- Video: ASF format (WMV video), AVI, Matroska (MKV), Quicktime (MOV), Ogg/Theora, Real media (RM)
It tries to give the more informations as possible. For some file formats, it gives really more informations then libextractor for example. RIFF parser is really good for example, it can extract creation date, software used to generate the file, etc. But hachoir-metadata can not 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.
Website: http://hachoir.org/wiki/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
Modes --mime and --type
Option --mime ask to just display file MIME type (works like UNIX "file --mime" program)::
$ 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
Option --file display short description of file type (works like UNIX "file" program)::
$ 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
What's new in hachoir-metadata 0.8.2?
New features:
- Truncate very long string (more than 800 characters)
- setup.py uses distutils by default (and not setuptools) and doesn't depend
on hachoir-core nor hachoir-parser
- Bugfixes
- AIFF: skip duration computation if rate is nul (to avoid division by zero)
- XCF: catch KeyError on bits_per_pixel
- JPEG (EXIF): only convert exposure to "1/%g" is value is a float
- WAVE: rewrite extractor. Fix bit rate, fix duration computation, support wave with 6 channels and IEEE (32-bit float) codec
- AVI: avoid division by zero in duration computation
- Matroska: convert string to Unicode if needed
What's new in hachoir-metadata 0.8.1?
- Fix --version command line option (rename module hachoir to hachoir_core)
What's new in hachoir-metadata 0.8?
New formats:
- Aldus Placeable Metafile (APM) picture
- Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF)
- Audio Interchange File Format Compressed (AIFC)
- Microsoft Enhanced Metafile (EMF) picture
- Microsoft Windows Metafile (WMF) picture
- Real audio
- Real media
- Targa picture
- Changes
- For string, strip spaces and then skip empty string
- ICO: use 8 bits/pixel if bpp=0
- JPEG: format version is "JFIF %u.%02u" (and not "JPEG %s.%s")
- JPEG: don't compute JPEG quality if needed fields are missing
- RIFF: compute duration of each stream since audio stream may be shorter than video stream
What's new in hachoir-metadata 0.7?
Important changes:
- New extractors: Ogg/Vorbis and Ogg/Theora
- JPEG: compute JPEG quality
- Matroska: extract subtitle info, support multiple audio and video streams, read audio codec, read audio/video title and language
- Audio: extract bits/sample for audio
- GIF: read comments and pixel format
- RIFF: able to use AVI header, support multiple audio streams
- ID3: also extract creation date
- IPTC: recognize more tags (author, country, title)
- Add --parser-list and --profiler command line options
Small changes:
- Strip spaces (space, tab, new line) for all strings keep the longer value
- Remove duplicate string and also if you have "verlongtext" and "verylo",
- Add warning when a tag is skipped (for ID3, etc.)
- Support invalid unicode filenames
- Fix all divison to avoid divison by zero
- TAR and ZIP archives: only process first 5 files
- EXIF: ignore image size if we already know the size since EXIF size is not updated when an image is resized
- Bitmap: read format version
Developer changes:
- Use array() to simply code
- Convert raw string to unicode string using charset ISO-8859-1
- Add get() method to Metadata class
- Group name can be "name[]": replaced by name[0], name[1], ...
Similar projects
- Kaa - http://freevo.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/freevo-2.0/Kaa (written in Python)
- libextractor: http://gnunet.org/libextractor/ (written in C)
A lot of other libraries are written to read and/or write metadata in MP3 music and/or EXIF photo.