Determining MPEG video frame resolution

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Sorry in advance if this is the wrong group to post this question to.

I'm writing an app that prints out the frame resolution of movie files
and image files in various common formats. I figured out how to get
this info from the RIFF header in .avi files; I was hoping I could do
something similar for the various mpegs...I don't even know how many
mpeg formats there are out there.

I don't want my app to depend on any codecs. I'm looking for
potentially something as simple as some byte offsets in the .mpg file
that contain the data I want. Does that exist? A freeware library
would be fine, too.

Thanks much.

-Sandeep