Handbrake: script to detect which files should be converted to 10bit?

[Analog Kid]

I'm trying to write a batch conversion script that converts media from MKV rips to HEVC. Handbrake has the option to convert to 10bit HEVC, but the files are much larger. I presume the 10bit mode is there for HDR content, so no reason to convert SDR content using that profile. Is there a way to detect by script which video files are HDR?

 

[bogdanw]

I don’t see an option in HandBrakeCLI that could be used to detect HDR, but maybe you could use ffmpeg.
Take a look at this AppleScript that detects the audio track
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/unable-to-remove-audio-in-quicktime-player-10-4.2354189/
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/cli/command-line-reference.html

 

[Analog Kid]

I don’t see an option in HandBrakeCLI that could be used to detect HDR, but maybe you could use ffmpeg.
Take a look at this AppleScript that detects the audio track
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/unable-to-remove-audio-in-quicktime-player-10-4.2354189/
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/cli/command-line-reference.html

Yeah, I've been looking through the documentation on ffprobe, which sounds like it might be able to do those kinds of queries, but man is it dense...

 

[bogdanw]

Based on
https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/22059/how-to-identify-hdr-video
https://ffmpeg.org/ffprobe-all.html
something simple might just work:

ffmpeg -i /path/to/hdr_file.mp4 2>&1 | grep -i "bt2020*"

I’ve tested with https://4kmedia.org/sony-food-fizzle-uhd-hdr-4k-demo/
https://4kmedia.org/sony-swordsmith-hdr-uhd-4k-demo/