[Rodney Baker]

Hi Michael. The syntax for sed and awk can be tricky, and they can both do pretty advanced stuff. I think awk may be the more appropriate tool for this, although it could be done directly using either Python or Perl too (but I’m not a programmer so I’m not the right person to ask about that).

Mind you, I’m no expert on awk or sed either, but I know that you can use either one to achieve what you want. Sed (Stream EDitor) is designed for line-by-line string editing/replacement, whereas awk is more powerful and probably more suited to parsing the data output from ffprobe and rewriting it into the format that you need for gnuplot. That is my understanding, anyway.

[Rodney Baker]

Use sed/awk to massage the data into a suitable format for graphing, then use gnuplot to produce the output. Once that it settled, tie it all together using a shell script/python/perl or your language of choice. All the tools to do it exist already – why reinvent the wheel?