FFmpeg file conversion formats and file extensions

Question

I hope someone knows a link to point me to here.

I'm converting different video and audio formats using ffmpeg. I want to only let files with file extensions be converted that are supported by ffmpeg. The supported formats are found here: http://ffmpeg.org/general.html#SEC4

My question: is there a list of file extensions somewhere? I don't want to research for every format which file extensions might be used for that. Or is there a pain-free format-recognition library or class for C#/.NET available, that can scan for a audio/video format?

Answer 1

If you call ffmpeg with just the input file and no other parameters, it will give you information on the contained streams, if it can read them.

ffmpeg -i input.avi

See this answer about identifying files before encoding.

Answer 2

Can't you just programmatically execute

ffmpeg -i filename -dframes 0 -vn -aframes 0 dummy.avi

and read the output and see if it says "Unsupported codec" or something like that at the end?

That encodes zero audio frames and nothing else into a dummy file. Actually you might need to tweak the options a little, because I'm not sure whether that will check if the video codec is supported.