Documentation:Format String

Starting with VLC media player 0.9.0, format string variables can be used with the following options:

• --marq-marquee
• --snapshot-path (when specifying a full image path, not a directory)
• --snapshot-prefix
• --image-out-prefix (or --scene-prefix in 1.0.0 and newer)
• --msn-format (windows only)
• file access output dst/url (like in std{access=file,mux=ts,dst=THIS})

There are two kinds of format string variables: time variables and meta variables.

Time

Time variables are those defined by the strftime C function. Those include:

• %Y : year
• %m : month
• %d : day
• %H : hour
• %M : minute
• %S : second

For an extensive list have a look at man strftime.

Meta

Meta variables are VLC specific. The complete list is:

• $a : artist
• $b : album
• $c : copyright
• $d : description
• $e : encoded by
• $f : frame count
• $g : genre
• $l : language
• $n : track num
• $p : now playing
• $r : rating
• $s : subtitles language
• $t : title
• $u : url
• $A : date
• $B : audio bitrate (in kb/s)
• $C : chapter (as in DVD chapter number)
• $D : duration
• $F : full name with path
• $I : title (as in DVD title number)
• $L : time left
• $N : name (media name as seen in the VLC playlist)
• $O : audio language
• $P : position (in %)
• $R : rate
• $S : audio sample rate (in kHz)
• $T : time code of the video
• $U : publisher
• $V : volume
• $_ : new line
• $<any other char> : <any other char> (for example: $$ transforms to $)

You can insert a space between the $ sign and the character to tell it to not display anything if the meta data isn't available. For example: $ T instead will display "" if no time is available while $T would display something like "01_22_13" (for a snapshot from one hour, 22 minutes and 13 seconds in a video).

Source code

If you want to know how this works, check out src\text\strings.c (str_format_meta function)[1]

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