How to show number of available streams using ffmpeg?

Question

I just want to see how many streams are inside my video file.

I looked at the official documentation and I cannot see what option I can use. Perhaps another command/terminal app can do something similar?

Any ideas how it can be done?

Answer 1

If you have ffprobe installed:

ffprobe <input> -show_entries format=nb_streams -v 0 -of compact=p=0:nk=1

You can also filter for video or audio streams by adding -select_streams v or -select_streams a, respectively. See the manual for more details.

If you do not have ffprobe, ffmpeg can be used too, but in a slightly less robust way (i.e., this may break if the output format changes or something contains the words "Stream #" in the output):

ffmpeg -i <input> 2>&1 | grep "Stream #" | wc -l