Determine video bitrate Python – Telegram API

Here is a solution using FFprobe:

• Execute ffprobe (command line tool) as sub-process and read the content of stdout.
  Use the argument -print_format json for getting the output in JSON format.
  For getting only the bit_rate entry, add argument -show_entries stream=bit_rate.
• Convert the returned string to dictionary using dict = json.loads(data).
• Get the bitrate from the dictionary and convert it to int: bit_rate = int(dict['streams'][0]['bit_rate']).

The code sample creates a sample video file for testing (using FFmpeg), and get the bitrate (using FFprobe):

import subprocess as sp
import shlex
import json

input_file_name = 'test.mp4'

# Build synthetic video for testing:
################################################################################
sp.run(shlex.split(f'ffmpeg -y -f lavfi -i testsrc=size=320x240:rate=30 -f lavfi -i sine=frequency=400 -f lavfi -i sine=frequency=1000 -filter_complex amerge -vcodec libx264 -crf 17 -pix_fmt yuv420p -acodec aac -ar 22050 -t 10 {input_file_name}'))
################################################################################

# Use FFprobe for 
# Execute ffprobe (to get specific stream entries), and get the output in JSON format
data = sp.run(shlex.split(f'ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=bit_rate -print_format json {input_file_name}'), stdout=sp.PIPE).stdout
dict = json.loads(data)  # Convert data from JSON string to dictionary
bit_rate = int(dict['streams'][0]['bit_rate'])  # Get the bitrate.

print(f'bit_rate = {bit_rate}')

Notes:

• For some video containers like MKV, there is no bit_rate information so different solution is needed.
• The code sample assumes that ffmpeg and ffprobe (command line tools) are in the execution path.

Solution for containers that has no bit_rate information (like MKV):

Based on the following post, we can sum the size of all the video packets.
We can also sum all the packets durations.
The average bitrate equals: total_size_in_bits / total_duration_in_seconds.

Here is a code sample for computing average bitrate for MKV video file:

import subprocess as sp
import shlex
import json

input_file_name = 'test.mkv'

# Build synthetic video for testing (MKV video container):
################################################################################
sp.run(shlex.split(f'ffmpeg -y -f lavfi -i testsrc=size=320x240:rate=30 -f lavfi -i sine=frequency=400 -f lavfi -i sine=frequency=1000 -filter_complex amerge -vcodec libx264 -crf 17 -pix_fmt yuv420p -acodec aac -ar 22050 -t 10 {input_file_name}'))
################################################################################

# https://superuser.com/questions/1106343/determine-video-bitrate-using-ffmpeg
# Calculating the bitrate by summing all lines except the last one, and dividing by the value in the last line.
data = sp.run(shlex.split(f'ffprobe -select_streams v:0 -show_entries packet=size,duration -of compact=p=0:nk=1 -print_format json {input_file_name}'), stdout=sp.PIPE).stdout
dict = json.loads(data)  # Convert data from JSON string to dictionary

# Sum total packets size and total packets duration.
sum_packets_size = 0
sum_packets_duration = 0
for p in dict['packets']:
    sum_packets_size += float(p['size'])  # Sum all the packets sizes (in bytes)
    sum_packets_duration += float(p['duration'])  # Sum all the packets durations (in mili-seconds).

# bitrate is the total_size / total_duration (multiply by 1000 because duration is in msec units, and by 8 for converting from bytes to bits).
bit_rate = (sum_packets_size / sum_packets_duration) * 8*1000

print(f'bit_rate = {bit_rate}')