Moin,
how do I get the duration in a shell script? The following code does not always compute the correct value
According to the record-length-patch you can use the size of index.vdr. Divide the size of index.vdr by 200 and you get the run time in seconds. Each entry in index.vdr is 8 bytes long (at least on my pc) and there is AFAICS one entry per frame. With 25 frames per seconds you got that divider.
So sth like echo "$(stat -c %s index.vdr) / 200.0" | bc would help you on a bash.
Gruss, Walter