Loop Over Video Files in Folder to get video length - applescript

Question

I have the following which returns how many seconds a selected video file is.
However I was after a way to just give it the movie folder and for it to then loop through all subdirectories and find all video file types.
Once it has these I would like to list the video length in "1 hour 53 seconds" type format as "7990 seconds" isn't too helpful.
Thanks
set macPath to (choose file) as text
tell application "System Events"
set ts to time scale of movie file macPath
set dur to duration of movie file macPath
set movieTime to dur / ts
end tell

Answer 1

You have several sub-questions involved in your question.
1) How do I get all of the files in a folder, including the sub folders
2) how do I filter that list to only include video files
3) How do I loop through that list of video files and extract information from each and
4) How do I convert seconds into a useable string of words
Normally I would ask that you break it down into those individual questions because it's a large task for someone to write the whole thing for you. However, in this case you're lucky because I had done this before myself... so you can have my script. I put lots of comments in the code to help you learn how it works.
-- I found these extensions for video files here http://www.fileinfo.net/filetypes/video
-- we can check the file extensions of a file against this list to evaluate if it's a video file
set video_ext_list to {"3g2", "3gp", "3gp2", "3gpp", "3mm", "60d", "aep", "ajp", "amv", "asf", "asx", "avb", "avi", "avs", "bik", "bix", "box", "byu", "cvc", "dce", "dif", "dir", "divx", "dv", "dvr-ms", "dxr", "eye", "fcp", "flc", "fli", "flv", "flx", "gl", "grasp", "gvi", "gvp", "ifo", "imovieproject", "ivf", "ivs", "izz", "izzy", "lsf", "lsx", "m1v", "m2v", "m4e", "m4u", "m4v", "mjp", "mkv", "moov", "mov", "movie", "mp4", "mpe", "mpeg", "mpg", "mpv2", "msh", "mswmm", "mvb", "mvc", "nvc", "ogm", "omf", "prproj", "prx", "qt", "qtch", "rm", "rmvb", "rp", "rts", "sbk", "scm", "smil", "smv", "spl", "srt", "ssm", "svi", "swf", "swi", "tivo", "ts", "vdo", "vf", "vfw", "vid", "viewlet", "viv", "vivo", "vob", "vro", "wm", "wmd", "wmv", "wmx", "wvx", "yuv"}
-- get the folder to check
set f to choose folder
-- notice the use of "entire contents" to also go through subfolders of f
-- use a "whose" filter to find only the video files
tell application "Finder"
set vidFiles to (files of entire contents of f whose name extension is in video_ext_list) as alias list
end tell
-- use a repeat loop to loop over a list of something
set vidList to {} -- this is where we store the information as we loop over the files
repeat with aFile in vidFiles
-- get some information from aFile
tell application "System Events"
set vidFile to movie file (aFile as text)
set ts to time scale of vidFile
set dur to duration of vidFile
end tell
-- add the information to the "storage" list we made earlier
set end of vidList to {POSIX path of aFile, secs_to_hms(dur / ts)}
end repeat
return vidList
(*=================== SUBROUTINES ===================*)
-- convert seconds into a string of words
-- the use of "mod" and "div" here makes it easy
-- we also make sure that each value is at least 2 places long to make it look nicer
on secs_to_hms(the_secs)
set timeString to ""
set hr to the_secs div hours
if hr is not 0 then set timeString to timeString & (text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & (hr as text))) & " hours "
set min to the_secs mod hours div minutes
if min is not 0 then set timeString to timeString & (text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & (min as text))) & " minutes "
set sec to the_secs mod minutes div 1
if sec is not 0 then
set fraction to text 2 thru 3 of ((100 + the_secs mod 1 * 100) as text)
set timeString to timeString & (sec as text) & "." & fraction & " seconds"
end if
if timeString ends with space then set timeString to text 1 thru -2 of timeString
return timeString
end secs_to_hms

Answer 2

I came across this post because I wanted to have a log of video files in a folder; something I could import in a spreadsheet, also to calculate the total duration but not only.
The posted script didn't work for me so I ended up importing the folder in Final Cut Pro, doing Batch Export on the folder and than File > Export > Batch List, which resulted in a plain text file I could import in a spreadsheet as the start of a log and to calculate the total duration.
Perhaps this helps others.