# Is there any way I can get the playing time of a movie file?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/is-there-any-way-i-can-get-the-playing-time-of-a-movie-file/2894>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Created:** [March 27, 2017, 4:16am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/is-there-any-way-i-can-get-the-playing-time-of-a-movie-file/2894 "2017-03-27T04:16:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

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**Author:** ![mbeltagy](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mbeltagy/32/130_2.png) [@mbeltagy](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbeltagy)\
**Post date:** [March 27, 2017, 3:31pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/is-there-any-way-i-can-get-the-playing-time-of-a-movie-file/2894/2 "2017-03-27T15:31:55Z")

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AFAIK Julia does not have support for that. There has to be program that would parse the headers of the movie file to get that information. The program of choice that does that on a command in is `ffmpeg` or `ffprobe`. The following snippet would allow you to do that in Julia by invoking an external program call. You need to have `ffmpeg` installed on your system for this work

```julia
function getDuration(vid_filename)
       p=Pipe()
       run(pipeline(`ffprobe -i $vid_filename`,stderr=p))
       close(p.in)
        duration=matchall(r"(\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}.\d{2})"
                            ,readstring(pipeline(p,`grep Duration`)))[1]
end

```

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