How to search for video files on Ubuntu?

Question

I had downloaded a video a few months back. I'm not very well remembering the name by which it is saved. Is there any command or any method that will output only video files so that I can search for my video there? From man pages, I couldn't find any option of find doing that work.

The video file I downloaded may have any extension (like webm etc) and also it may be possible that I had that time changed the name to anything like 'abcde' which I don't remember now. So the search can't be based on file name!

(Just mentioning one similarity: In perl there are commands to check whether a file is text file or binary , etc. Similarly there may be a way to check if its video file or multimedia file)

Answer 1

The basic idea is to use the file utility to determine the type of each file, and filter on video files.

find /some/directory -type f -exec file -N -i -- {} + |
sed -n 's!: video/[^:]*$!!p'

This prints the names of all files in /some/directory and its subdirectories recursively whose MIME type is a video type.

The file command needs to open every file, which can be slow. To speed things up:

• Restrict the command to the directory trees where it's likely to be, such as /tmp, /var/tmp and your home directory.
• Restrict the search to files whose size is in the right ballpark, say at least 10MB.
• Restrict the search to files whose modification time is in the right ballpark. Note that downloading the file may have set its modification time to the time of download or preserved the time, depending on what program you used to download (and with what settings). You may also filter on the inode change time (ctime), which is the time the file was last modified or moved around (created, renamed, etc.) in any way.

Here's an example which constrains the modification time to be at least 60 days ago and the ctime to be no more than 100 days ago.

find /tmp /var/tmp ~ -type f -size +10M \
     -mtime +60 -ctime -100 \
     -exec file -N -i -- {} + |
sed -n 's!: video/[^:]*$!!p'

Answer 2

Searching by file name

As Chris mentioned in his answer you can use find to do this but I find it much faster to search through the locate database.

Assuming your distro provides this facility, most of the big ones do, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, etc.

Example

$ locate --basename .mp4 .mkv .wmv .flv .webm .mov .avi | head -5
/home/saml/Desktop/sample_mpeg4.mp4
/home/saml/Downloads/Karrolls_Christmas/Karroll's Christmas (2004) part 1.mp4
/home/saml/Downloads/Karrolls_Christmas/Karroll's Christmas (2004) part 10.mp4
/home/saml/Downloads/Karrolls_Christmas/Karroll's Christmas (2004) part 2.mp4
/home/saml/Downloads/Karrolls_Christmas/Karroll's Christmas (2004) part 3.mp4

Searching by file type

To find the files by type you can use the command file to get a list of info about a particular file's type.

Here's a rough list of these file types from my system, Fedora 19.

• .mp4: ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 1
• .mkv: EBML file, creator matroska
• .wmv: Microsoft ASF
• .flv: Macromedia Flash Video
• .webm: WebM
• .mov: ISO Media, Apple QuickTime movie
• .avi: AVI

You can use this command to find all the files in your /home/<user> directory.

$ find /home/<user> -type f -exec file {} + | \
    grep -E "MPEG v4|EBML|\
      Microsoft ASF|Macromedia Flash Video|WebM|Apple QuickTime movie|AVI"

Alternatively you can use file and search by mime-types that are categorized as "video".

 -i, --mime
         Causes the file command to output mime type strings rather than 
         the more traditional human readable ones.  Thus it may say 
         ‘text/plain; charset=us-ascii’ rather than “ASCII text”.

Adapting what we've done above to something like this:

$ find /home/<user> -type f -exec file -i {} + | grep video

You can use sed to get just the filenames:

$ find /home/<user> -type f -exec file -i {} + |
    sed -n '/video/s/:[^:]\+$//p'

Answer 3

Since you now specify that it can't be based on extension, you can also peruse file (warning: this could take a long time):

find ~ -type f -exec file -i {} + | grep video 

If you could have searched by filename, assuming that it has a common video extension and it is somewhere in your home directory:

find ~ -type f -name '*.mkv' -o -name '*.mp4' -o -name '*.wmv' -o -name '*.flv' -o -name '*.webm' -o -name '*.mov'

You can also use a regex:

find ~ -type f -regex '.*\.\(mkv\|mp4\|wmv\|flv\|webm\|mov\)'

If you have a good idea about when you downloaded it (and assuming the mtime was set to that time), you could also try narrowing it down with GNU find's -mtime option.