Show the audio bitrate of a video

[ygoe]

Hi,

how can I see the audio bitrate of a video file? The codec info dialog doesn't have this information. ffprobe also can't show it to me.

I'm using VLC player 2.2.6 for Windows.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

VLC estimates the bit rate while playing. But that's only an estimate.

[ygoe]

Can't this value be determined exactly? I mean there is only a finite amount of data for the audio stream and it has a known length. My math education tells me there is a way to calculate it.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

You don't need VLC to divide the file size by the media duration. With that said, what's usually called audio bit rate is a quality setting of the audio encoder, and there are no generic ways to reconstitute it, if it' s not in the metadata.

[ygoe]

To divide these numbers, I'd first have to separate the audio from the video stream. I wasn't going to edit that stuff, I'd just like to know from a quick look.

I know that some encoders are configured with a quality level, but I'm not interested in that. I'd just like to see how many bits per second were used for the audio to get a rough feeling of how much I can expect from it. There's a difference between AAC 60 kbit/s and 190 kbit/s, and I have a rough feeling for comparing AAC with MP3. The difference is not always easy to hear, especially if you have nothing to compare with because that's the only version of the file.

That's why I want the numbers. The existing stats in VLC can't tell me anything near that. They can only tell me for audio-only files with a fixed bitrate. Probably reading it from the stream header.