Snail#

Let's say you want to embed some videos on your website, and you want to put them in a list so people can click through and watch them.

The title, description, and thumbnail you give to the video are largely subjective decisions, but the duration - in minutes and seconds - is an objective property of the media itself, which means you should be able to extract it if you know the video's URL. But how exactly do you do that?

Well, the first thing you'll need to do is figure out what exactly you're dealing with: a raw video file (or stream) that plays in the browser's <video> tag, or a link to a page on a site like YouTube or Vimeo that hosts embeddable content. Technologically speaking, it's an entirely different beast. A YouTube page gives you the code for a player, and wraps all of it up with copy protection and a variety of other features specific to the platform. In other words, it's not handing the end user something to play; it's playing it for them. It's kind of like the difference between having a record of a song, and having a band come over with their own instruments to play it on.

That doesn't mean they can't serve the same purpose for the end user of your site, though, and in both cases it should be possible to programmatically determine the duration of the media. I've written a .NET library (ISchemm.DurationFinder) that handles this for you for a variety of common video types with just a URL; I'll walk through how it works overall, and how it finds the duration for each type of media that it supports.