gst-typefind-0.10

gst-typefind-0.10 [OPTIONS] FILE

-h, --help
    Displays a brief help message and exits, outlining the command's basic usage and available options.

-v, --version
    Prints the version information for the gst-typefind-0.10 utility and the GStreamer core library it's linked against.

The gst-typefind-0.10 command is a diagnostic utility from the GStreamer 0.10 series of the multimedia framework. Its primary function is to analyze the content of a specified file and attempt to determine its media MIME type (e.g., video/mp4, audio/mpeg, image/jpeg).

It achieves this by utilizing GStreamer's internal typefinding mechanisms, which inspect file headers and patterns to match them against known media formats and codecs. This tool is invaluable for developers and users troubleshooting multimedia playback issues, verifying file formats, or understanding what kind of media data a file contains. While the -0.10 suffix indicates it belongs to an older, but historically significant, branch of GStreamer, the core functionality of type detection remains fundamental across GStreamer versions.

This command is part of the older GStreamer 0.10 series, which is largely superseded by the GStreamer 1.x series. Consequently, it may not support newer audio/video codecs or file formats introduced after the 0.10 branch ceased active development. Users are generally advised to use the more current gst-typefind (without the -0.10 suffix) or gst-discover tools from the GStreamer 1.x ecosystem for modern media analysis.

To determine the MIME type of a video file named my_video.mp4, you would run:

gst-typefind-0.10 my_video.mp4

The output would typically be something like: video/quicktime (for MP4 files, GStreamer sometimes identifies it as quicktime due to container similarities) or audio/mpeg for an MP3 file.

The gst-typefind-0.10 command was a standard utility included with the GStreamer 0.10 multimedia framework, which was a dominant version of GStreamer for many years. It was developed to provide a quick and reliable way to identify media types, crucial for GStreamer's dynamic pipeline construction. Although the 0.10 series has been largely succeeded by GStreamer 1.x, tools like gst-typefind formed the foundation for similar utilities in modern GStreamer, demonstrating the consistent need for robust media introspection capabilities.

gst-launch-0.10(1), gst-inspect-0.10(1), file(1), mediainfo(1)