I'm using FFMPEG to measure the duration of videos stored in an Amazon S3 Bucket.

I've read the FFMPEG docs, and they explicitly state that all whitespace and special characters need to be escaped, in order for FFMPEG to handle them properly:

See docs 2.1 and 2.1.1: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-utils.html

However, when dealing with files whose filenames contain whitespace, ffmpeg fails to render a result.

I've tried the following, with no success

ffmpeg -i "http://s3.mybucketname.com/videos/my\ video\ file.mov" 2>&1 | grep Duration | awk '{print $2}' | tr -d
ffmpeg -i "http://s3.mybucketname.com/videos/my video file.mov" 2>&1 | grep Duration | awk '{print $2}' | tr -d
ffmpeg -i "http://s3.mybucketname.com/videos/my'\' video'\' file.mov" 2>&1 | grep Duration | awk '{print $2}' | tr -d
ffmpeg -i "http://s3.mybucketname.com/videos/my\ video\ file.mov" 2>&1 | grep Duration | awk '{print $2}' | tr -d

However, if I strip out the whitespace in the filename – all is well, and the duration of the video is returned.