NAME

tcprobe - probe multimedia streams from medium and print information on the standard output

SYNOPSIS

tcprobe: -i name [ -B ] [ -M ] [ -T title ] [ -b bitrate ] [ -H n ] [ -f seekfile ] [ -d verbosity ] [ -v ]

COPYRIGHT

tcprobe is Copyright (C) by Thomas Oestreich.

DESCRIPTION

tcprobe is part of and usually called by transcode.
However, it can also be used independently.
tcprobe reads source (from stdin if not explicitely defined) and prints on the standard output.

OPTIONS

-i name

Specify input source. If ommited, stdin is assumed.
You can specify a file, directory, device, mountpoint or host address as input source. tcprobe usually handles the different types correctly.

-B

Binary output to stdout for use in transcode.

-M

Use EXPERIMENTAL mplayer probe, useful for streams that tcprobe doesn't recognize elsewhere. With this option enabled, tcprobe merely acts as a frontend for mplayer; of course mplayer binary needs to be installed and avalaible somewhere in PATH.

-T title

Probe for DVD title

-H n

This option tells tcprobe to scan n MB of input data. Default is to scan 1 MB. To detect all subtitles and audio tracks (if available) it is highly recommended that this n should be at least increased to 10 or even higher. Very often only some audio tracks start during the first MB of a VOB or DVD file so transcode cannot detect them if not called with a higher value. Please note that transcode(1) has a similar -H option as well which has the same meaning.

-s n

Skip the first n bytes of the input stream. Default is to skip no bytes.

-b bitrate

Set audio encoder bitrate to bitrate

-f seekfile

Read index/seek information from seekfile. This is especially useful for AVI files when it takes a long time to probe when there is no index in the AVI available. Also see aviindex(1).

-d level

With this option you can specify a bitmask to enable different levels of verbosity (if supported). You can combine several levels by adding the corresponding values:

QUIET 0

INFO 1

DEBUG 2

STATS 4

WATCH 8

FLIST 16

VIDCORE 32

SYNC 64

COUNTER 128

PRIVATE 256

-v

Print version information and exit.

NOTES

tcprobe is a front end for probing various source types and is used in transcode's import modules.

EXAMPLES

The command tcprobe -i foo.avi will print interesting information about the AVI file itself and its video and audio content.

AUTHORS

tcprobe was written by Thomas Oestreich
<ostreich@theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de> with contributions from many others. See AUTHORS for details.