What is the proper way to read the properties of a AVI file? I mean the properties that is displayed if you right-click a AVI file in Windows and select Properties: Picture size (width/height) Sound length/bitrate/etc Video bitrate/codec/etc Any help appreciated. Regards; NewAge-B

A proper way ? Properties display true values if appriopriate codec is installed in the system, otherwise values might be invalid.

Need to get some infos in OGG/OGM/AVI/MPEG 

Re: Need to get some infos in OGG/OGM/AVI/MPEG 

AVI files contain average bitrate values in the header, but they are nothing you should rely on, and some programs write wrong values thereto. To obtain the correct average video bitrate of an AVI file, you need to parse the idx1 chunk (or indx-chunk of 1st stream in case of OpenDML, as well as all ix00 chunks if you want to obtain the correct length of an OpenDML file with broken dwDuration values, such as files written with VirtualDub 1.4.10 or earlier) and check the framerate in the strf-chunk of the video stream (NOT the dwMicroSecPerFrame-value in the main avi header: This one can be broken if someone used DirectShow for muxing of the file)

Agreed with you for average bitrate values in the header, I can't rely on it! This is why I am looking for another possibility... But I use dwDuration and dwMicroSecPerFrame :( OK for this method to have the good duration and framerate, but how have the bitrate with it? (I have thes size of the file, but not the size of video stream...) Thanks!

You must read and process the entire index to get the overall size of the video stream :) If legacy index and opendml index are present, you can ignore the legacy index. This is what I do in AVI-Mux GUI.

M$ writes crap obviously. Another note: The dwTotalFrames value is to contain the number of frames only in the first RIFF list! This is to make this part compatible to AVI 1.0. M$ obviously doesn't remember that they have demanded this on Feb 27th, 1996, when they released OpenDML 1.02 specs: Any OpenDML file created with DirectShow will contain the overall total number of frames in that member. The overall total number of video frames should be stored in the dmlh chunk, which is located in the odml list. If you read the dwTotalFrames member to obtain the number of video frames, you'll get the correct number only for "small" AVI files and for "broken" files created with DirectShow, but not for correct files, e.g. created with AVI-Mux GUI or VirtualDub 1.4.11 or higher (in fact, the dis very value is also correct in older versions of VDub). Anyway, I don't rely on either value, neither do I trust M$ implementations like VFW or DS, and have decided to parse the entire index in AVI-Mux GUI. Imagine this: DirectShow does not open any OpenDML files with more than 3 audio streams. To implement even reading of such (correct) AVI files, you need to go "the hard way". was where I got all my info on AVI files from.