ffmpeg pipe to mediainfo

Question

I need to get infos from the raw h264 track of a mkv file.

Some times ago, I used to extract the h264 raw stream, and analyze it by itself.

now, I would like to limit the disk usage, avoiding the extract process, so there are 2 choices:

• use ffmpeg to pipe h264 to mediainfo

• use a sort of ramdisk

I tried

ffmpeg -i original.mkv -map 0:v:0 -c copy -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb -f h264 - | mediainfo -

but it returns none

where am I wrong?

Answer 1

mediainfo does not (yet) support pipes (-). You may want to add a feature request on MediaInfo tracker.

but... I don't see which kind of better metadata report you get with that, compared to 'mediainfo original.mkv', as MediaInfo supports parsing of H264 in MKV.