[SOLVED] finding video geometry without playing it

i have a whole bunch of video files that i would like to find the geometry for. the "mplayer -identify" command can do this but it also still plays the video. using "-vo null" avoids the video window but it still spends time "playing" the video. a program named XXXplayer would be expected to focus on playing things. how can i display the geometry of a video file without any effort to play the video (in a script)? i've searched online and checked man pages for ffmpeg and mplayer (each having way too many options to guess what to search for).