How to list movies with a certain resolution in finder?

[tinoman]

I want to search in my movie library which videos have over 720p in resolution. How do I do that? Is there a search criteria i can use? - I went through them and none seemed appropriate.

Thank you –

 

[LethalWolfe]

I want to search in my movie library which videos have over 720p in resolution. How do I do that? Is there a search criteria i can use? - I went through them and none seemed appropriate.

Thank you –

Nothing like this exists in Finder. The quickest way is to open up the movie in QT and hit command + i to 'get info'.

 

[kryten2]

I want to search in my movie library which videos have over 720p in resolution. How do I do that? Is there a search criteria i can use? - I went through them and none seemed appropriate.

Thank you –

Try this :

 

[ChrisA]

I want to search in my movie library which videos have over 720p in resolution. How do I do that?...

An approximation of that is to sort by size. IT's not accurate as the longer movies are larger too.

In now that we have "tags" in finder you cold add tags for the revolution, like 480, 720, 1080 and then after manually tagging each movie it would be easy.

 

[floh]

I want to search in my movie library which videos have over 720p in resolution. How do I do that? Is there a search criteria i can use? - I went through them and none seemed appropriate.

Thank you –

Spotlight on its own to my knowledge does not provide this search criteria, but the Spotlight metadata index contains the necessary information. I'm afraid you will have to consult the terminal to get a very simple way to find all matching video files.

To do this, just open the "Terminal" app and type in (or copy-paste):

mdfind "kMDItemContentTypeTree == public.movie && kMDItemPixelHeight >= 720"

As you can probably tell, this is a very powerful tool. Do you kind of understand what the different options do? The most important things are:

1. The command "mdfind" is exactly what Spotlight does in the background.
2. The relation "==" means the value needs to be exactly this, ">=" means equal or larger.
3. The "&&" in the middle of the quotes means that both conditions, left and right of this logic combination, need to be true. The other important one would be "||" for a logical "or".
4. The metadata fields "kMDItemContentTypeTree" and "kMDItemPixelHeight" are what you are actually searching for. If you need further options, the easiest way to find them is to execute "mdls File.mov", where File.mov is some movie file, and look at the output.

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Two more remarks:

1. If you only want to search a certain folder, e.g. "Movies" in you home directory, you can add the option "-onlyin <folder>" to the command.

2. The "kMDItemContentTypeTree" condition is necessary because otherwise, all pictures on your hard drive with a resolution of more than 720p will be listed as well. So if you are only searching within a movie library folder, you can skip this.

An example would then be:

mdfind -onlyin ~/Movies/ "kMDItemPixelHeight >= 720"

 

[vermeer82]

Thank you so much! This 2011 tip still works in 2019 FTW!