FFProbe Bitrate Graph
This project contains a script for plotting the bitrate of an audio or video stream over time. To get the frame bitrate data ffprobe is used from the ffmpeg package. The ffprobe data is streamed to python as xml frame metadata and optionally sorted by frame type. Matplotlib is used to plot the overall bitrate or each frame type on the same graph with lines for the peak and mean bitrates. The resulting bitrate graph can be saved as an image.
Possible outputs are:
- Image types (png, svg, pdf, ...)
- Raw frame data (csv, xml)
Requirements:
- Python >= 3.5
- FFMpeg >= 1.2 with the ffprobe command
- Matplotlib
For using the script from source, install the requirements with
pip install -r requirements.txt or use the requirements-dev.txt
for development purposes.
pip install plotbitrate
The raw frame data can be stored in an xml file with the option -f xml_raw,
which the graph can be plotted from. This is useful if the graph should be
shown multiple times with different options, as the source file doesn't need to
be scanned again.
The option --downscale (or -d) is useful if the video is very long and an
overview of the bitrate fluctuation is sufficient and zooming in is not
necessary. This behavior resembles that of the tool "Bitrate Viewer". With this
option, videos will be shown as a downscaled graph, meaning not every second is
being displayed. Multiple seconds will be grouped together and the max value
will be drawn. This downscaling is not applied when viewing individual frame
types as this would lead to wrong graphs. This behavior can be adjusted with
the --max-display-values option. The default value is 700, meaning that at
most 700 individual seconds/bars are drawn.
Show video stream bitrate in a window with progress.
plotbitrate input.mkv
Show downscaled video stream bitrate in a window.
plotbitrate -d input.mkv
Show video stream bitrate for each frame type in a window.
plotbitrate -t input.mkv
Save video stream bitrate to an SVG file.
plotbitrate -o output.svg input.mkv
Show audio stream bitrate in a window.
plotbitrate -s audio input.mkv
Save raw ffproble frame data as xml file.
plotbitrate -f xml_raw -o frames.xml input.mkv
Show bitrate graph from raw xml.
plotbitrate frames.xml