access video file information using standard Unix utilities

Question

I want to access video file information (specifically, the video horizontal and vertical dimensions) in the Bash terminal of Scientific Linux on a system over which I do not have root privileges. The setup is conservative and does not feature the modern utilities, such as exiftool and avprobe, that would be used to do this. What would be a way of accessing this information using standard Unix utilities or some other means likely to work on a conservative Linux setup? To be specific, I am looking for something such as the following:

<utility> video1.mp4
1280x720

Thanks for any ideas!

Answer 1

How to build and run typical open source software from source without root

Even if you don't have root, provided that:

1. you can at least use the compiler and related tools
2. you can download source code
3. you don't need too many strange libraries

then download the source code for your tool of choice and install it into $HOME/opt/somedir.

For example, for avprobe you could probably download the last stable source release, then build it like this:

tar xzf libav.....gz
cd libav.....
./configure --prefix=$HOME/opt/libav
make
make install

then run it as

$HOME/opt/libav/bin/avprobe

You may or may not need to tweak the value of LD_LIBRARY_PATH or various other things.