ExifTool newbie

[Anonymous Monk]

Hello Monks,

I am in the process of learning Perl and so i am trying to make some scripts to get hands on it. Some people are beginning to use a quite exotic encoding that is not compatible with my set top box so i decided to use this to get a better grip on Perl.

What i am looking for is a tag in Matroska container using ExifTool, using other cli tools the tag i am looking for is looking like this :

CodecPrivate, length 51 (h.264 profile: High 10 @L4.1)

The doc on ExifTool redirected me to find :

http://search.cpan.org/~exiftool/Image-ExifTool-8.65/lib/Image/ExifTool/TagNames.pod#Matroska_Tags

0x23a2 CodecPrivate?

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Data::Dump;
use Image::ExifTool;

#CodecPrivate, length 51 (h.264 profile: High 10 @L4.1)

my @files = <*>;
foreach my $file (@files) {
    next unless ($file =~ m/\.mkv$/);
    print $file . " is being parsed\n";

    my $exifTool = new Image::ExifTool;
    $exifTool->ExtractInfo($file, 'Verbose');
    my $info = $exifTool->GetInfo('CodecPrivate?');

    print "Tags:"; 
    print pp $info;
    print "\n";
}

But $info is empty, any directions what i did wrong is heartly welcomed.

[toolic]

Check if ExtractInfo was successful (Tip #11 from the Basic debugging checklist):

if ($exifTool->ExtractInfo($file, 'Verbose')) {
    # do your stuff
}
else {
    die "ExtractInfo error";
}

[JavaFan]

The documentation you're linking at says that if a tagname is followed by a question mark, it's only extracted when giving the unknown option. And I think it also means that it's not part of the actual tag name (so, you should use "CodecPrivate" as argument to GetInfo).

Note that I have no experience with the format you're working with -- all I did was read the beginning of the manual page you're linking to.