TechniTip.Net

Get Information of Media Files with MediaInfo

If you deal with media files like audio and video you will sometimes need more technical information about such files, like codec, bitrate, fps, aspect ratio and more. To gather such information there is a nice tool called “MediaInfo” available for download. Once installed MediaInfo just right click on your media file and open it with MediaInfo. That’s all.

Which information does it display?

• General: title, author, director, album, track number, date, duration…
• Video: codec, aspect, fps, bitrate…
• Audio: codec, sample rate, channels, language, bitrate…
• Text: language of subtitle
• Chapters: number of chapters, list of chapters

Which kind of formats (containers) does it support?

• Video: MKV, OGM, AVI, DivX, WMV, QuickTime, Real, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DVD (VOB)…
  (Codecs: DivX, XviD, MSMPEG4, ASP, H.264, AVC…)
• Audio: OGG, MP3, WAV, RA, AC3, DTS, AAC, M4A, AU, AIFF…
• Subtitles: SRT, SSA, ASS, SAMI…

For more details visit the MediaInfo homepage. Download is available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

Video Player for Windows/Linux/MAC

You are looking for a video player which simply plays your movies? Sounds easy, but usually the Microsoft Media Player complains some missing codecs, other players are slow, often crashing… Watching different kind of video formats seems difficult on the PC. Too many formats are available, .WMV, .MOV, .MPG, .AVI and many more.

The crazy thing: .WMV is not equal .WMV. The codec behind is really a different thing. In my opinion best solution would be that only MPEG2 and MPEG4/H.264 would be used. But as usual licensing and other policital issues make it more difficult. So we are faced to a very high number of video formats and codecs.

Quite annoying for the user who only wants to watch a movie which will often not work. My suggestion is to use the VLC media player. It’s free to use,  supports almost any video format and works on all well known operating systems.

Furthermore it supports many options for video streaming. Below is a screen shot of a NASA HD video which shows the Endeavor launch on mission STS-126. There you will find other HD videos.

See also:

• VLC media player download
• NASA HD video download