How To Find Video & Audio Codecs Of A Media File Using MediaInfo

Posted by dkszone on May 6, 2010

Do you want to get detailed information of any media file, such as the video & audio streams, the container, codecs used for encoding, fps, aspect ratio, resolution, audio channels, and so on? Media Info is a free media tool that lets you get all these info and more.

After installation, Media Info shows up the Preferences dialog, where you choose the interface language, the output template for the media information, etc. By default Media Info integrates with Windows shell to give you right click access to any supported media file’s information. You can disable this if you your Windows PC is slowing down on right-clicks by unselecting the option ‘Shell Extension’.

media-info-preferences

You can open a media file in MediInfo either by going to File –> Open –> File (Alt + O) or by right-clicking on the file and selecting Media Info. mediainfo-right-click-file Media Info shows up all the information regarding the file, such as the container format, video codec, audio codec, video aspect ratio, video bitrate, audio bitrate, audio sample rate, channels, video frames per second, etc. Apart from these audio & video info, you can also view other general information such as the title, author, album, track number, number & list of chapters, the language of the subtitle track, etc.

Supported container formats for Video are: MKV, OGM, AVI, DivX, WMV, QuickTime,, Real, MPEG-1/2/4, DVD (VOB) and for Audio are MP3, WAV, RA, AC3, DTS, AAC, M4A, AU, OGG, AIFF). Supported file formats for subtitles are SRT, SSA, ASS, SAMI.

dvd-video-mpeg-stream-audio-stream-media-info The best part is that Media Info also shows the mastered date, i.e the date of the creation of the media file, and also the writing application that was used. For instance MediaInfo identified the camera that was used to take one of the video files. If you simply want to identify the video & audio streams in an MKV file without extracting MKV, then Media Info is a better alternative to the already featured MKVToolnix.

Unable to play a video or audio file due to a missing audio or video codec? Open the file in Media Info to find the codec that is needed to play it. Then go ahead and download the codec from the website suggested by Media Info.

Download Media Info

Available for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux ( Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora), Solaris, etc.

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