У себя в дебиане по запросу "avi meta" нашел такой пакет:
Package: extract
Description: displays meta-data from files of arbitrary type
Similar to the well-known "file" command, extract can display meta-data from a
file and print the results to stdout.
.
Currently, libextractor supports the following formats: HTML, PDF, PS, OLE2
(DOC, XLS, PPT), OpenOffice (sxw), StarOffice (sdw), DVI, MAN, MP3 (ID3v1 and
ID3v2), OGG, WAV, EXIV2, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, DEB, RPM, TAR(.GZ), ZIP, ELF,
REAL, RIFF (AVI), MPEG, QT and ASF.
.
Also, various additional MIME types are detected. It can also be used to
compute hash functions (SHA-1, MD5, ripemd160).
Homepage: http://www.gnunet.org/libextractor/

Возможно от mplayer или идущих с ним утилит можно получить.