I’m working on an ASP.NET app that allows users to upload video files. After the user uploads, I need to determine some of the attributes of the media – namely it’s duration/length, resolution, and codec (if possible).
What’s the simplest way to approach this? Should I use the WMP SDK – this seems to involve actually instantiating the media player on the server. Is there anything in the framework to do this, or do I need to rely on an external library?
I’m not concerned about displaying or streaming the video back to the user.
There is nothing in the framework, you will need some sort of library. The best I’ve seen (but it has been a year or so since I’ve looked) is taglib-sharp:
http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/TagLib_Sharp
The site seems to be down right now, but I see that it’s been ported to fink (for OSX) only a couple of months ago, so I assume that is temporary.
oops, just saw that you’re not the first to ask a question along these lines and I’m not the first to suggest taglib-sharp:
View/edit ID3 data for MP3 files
(note: it supports audio and video files).
hth