[MPlayer-users] let mplayer only give out info

[Praktikant 03 DADC]

hello everybody!

i would like to use mplayer just to give out information about multimedia 
files (with the -identify flag).
the file should NOT be played. i tried the flags -nosound, -novideo, -ao 
null, -vo null. no success.
then i tried to do something like
        mplayer file.ext& sleep 2; echo finished
but the result of that is, that i do not get any output after "Compiled 
for..." line.

what should i do to get the disired result?
thanks in advance for the help
regards
--alex