Display detailed media info with MediaInfo

Ever wish you could tell what bitrate an audio or video file was encoded at without opening it up in a media player first? Or have you ever had trouble figuring out what codecs you need to install to play a file? Sure, you could open your files up in a multipurpose tool like VirtualDub. But if you don't want to use a video editor just to read some file properties, MediaInfo could do the trick.

MediaInfo is a lightweight, cross-platform open source application that will let you see detailed file properties for pretty much any audio or video file. A few weeks ago we told you about MediaInfo for Mac, but there are also versions that run on Windows and Linux machines. You can either install the Windows version or run it as an executable file from a portable flash drive.

Even if you don't use the installer, you have the option of adding MediaInfo to the right-click context menu. In other words, you can right-click on any multimedia file to bring up a window showing its properties. If you'd rather not clutter up your context menus, you can just launch MediaInfo and find the files you want to examine.

[via The Portable Freeware Collection]

Tags: freeware, media-properties, mediainfo, opensource