hachoir-metadata is tool to extract metadata from multimedia files (sound, video, archives, etc.): see output examples!

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 (and not on libmatroska, libmpeg2, libvorbis, etc.)

Download

• Download and install hachoir-metadata
• Browse source code online
• Hachoir-metadata on Python Cheeseshop

Code example

See hachoir-metadata code example.

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

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 --file 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:

$ 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.

Integration of hachoir-metadata

• amplee is a Python implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP)
• Plone? (project in snow sprint 2007)
  • See also plone4artists-sprint

TODO

#83

TIFF metadata are poor

#88

Extract file type: MIME type, ontology or something else?

#125

Use Dublin Core

#172

Hachoir metadata returns wrong MIME type

See also

See also: file format resources.

Informations

• (fr) DCMI Metadata Terms: Classification of meta-datas done by the Dublin Core
• (fr) Dublin Core article on Openweb website
• (fr) avi_ogminfo : Informations about AVI and OGM files
• (en) Xesam (was Wasabi): common interface between programs extracting metadata

Libraries

• (fr|en) MediaInfo (GPL v2, C++)
• (en) Mutagen: audio metadata tag reader and writer (Python)
• (en) getid3: Library written in PHP to extact meta-datas from several multimedia file formats (and not only MP3)
• (fr|en) libextractor: Library dedicated to meta-data extraction. See also: (en) Bader's Python binding
• (en) Kaa (part of Freevo), it replaces mmpython (Media Metadata for Python) (dead project)
• (en) ExifTool: Perl library to read and write metadata

Programs

• jpeginfo
• ogginfo
• mkvinfo
• mp3info

Programs using metadata

• GLScube ; Beagle (Kerry) ; Beagle++ ; Nepomuk
• Extractors? Tracker ; Strigi
• Other: Lucene (full text search)