What Is MediaInfo and How Do You Use It to Inspect Video and Audio File Details?

Updated

MediaInfo is a free, open-source tool from MediaArea that gives you a unified display of the most relevant technical and tag data for video and audio files. It reports codec, track, subtitle, and chapter information for containers such as AVI, MKV, and OGM, and it is available as a GUI application, a command-line tool, and a DLL/library that developers can integrate into their own software. Use it when you need to know exactly what is inside a media file — which video codec, which audio tracks, what subtitles, and where the chapters fall — without playing the file.

What MediaInfo reports

MediaInfo extracts both technical data (how the file is encoded) and tag data (descriptive metadata). For a typical video file, that includes:

  • Container/general: format, overall bitrate, duration, file size, writing application
  • Video: codec, resolution, frame rate, bit depth, scan type, aspect ratio
  • Audio: codec, channels, sample rate, bit rate, language
  • Subtitles: subtitle track format, language, and whether they are forced or default
  • Chapters: chapter markers and their timestamps

This is the same information you would otherwise have to dig out with several different tools. MediaInfo presents it in one view, which is why it is widely used by archivists, encoding engineers, and developers.

Supported containers

MediaArea describes MediaInfo as a unified display for video and audio files generally, and the tool is commonly used with containers such as AVI, MKV, and OGM, alongside many other formats. The practical point is that the same interface and the same output structure work across container types, so you can compare an AVI and an MKV side by side without switching tools.

Three ways to use it

1. GUI application

The desktop app shows the file's properties in a readable tree: General, Video, Audio, Text (subtitles), and Menu (chapters). This is the fastest way to answer "what codec is this?" or "does this file have subtitles?" — open the file and read the sections.

2. Command line

The CLI produces the same data as text, which makes it scriptable. You point it at a file and get a structured report you can grep, log, or feed into a pipeline. This is the form most useful for batch inspection of a media library.

3. MediaInfo DLL / library

For developers, MediaInfo ships as a DLL/library that can be integrated into other applications. This is how third-party tools embed MediaInfo's analysis rather than reimplementing format parsing. If you are building software that needs to identify codecs or read tags, the library is the integration path; the GUI and CLI are built on the same analysis engine.

How to read the output

When you inspect a file, work through the sections in order:

  1. General — confirms the container format and total duration. If the container is wrong here, everything downstream is suspect.
  2. Video — the codec name tells you what decoder is needed; resolution and frame rate tell you about playback and re-encoding targets.
  3. Audio — check codec, channel count, and sample rate. Multiple audio tracks will each appear as a separate entry, often with a language tag.
  4. Text / subtitles — lists subtitle tracks and their languages. If this section is absent, the file has no subtitle stream.
  5. Menu / chapters — shows chapter entries and timestamps. If there is no Menu section, the file has no chapter information.

For example, if you need to confirm whether an MKV has a separate subtitle track before archiving it, the presence of a Text section with a language entry answers that directly, and the Menu section tells you whether navigation chapters exist.

Free and open source

MediaArea is an open-source software company focused on digital media analysis, and MediaInfo is its flagship product. The project is open source, which means you can inspect the code, participate, or fork it. Downloads and further documentation are available from MediaArea's site, where MediaInfo has its own download and support pages alongside related projects such as MediaConch, QCTools, and BWF MetaEdit.

When to reach for it

Use MediaInfo when you need a definitive, tool-independent answer about a media file's contents — verifying a codec before delivery, checking subtitle and chapter tracks before archiving, or building media inspection into your own application via the DLL. It is not a player or an editor; it is an inspector, and that focus is what makes its output consistent across AVI, MKV, OGM, and the many other formats it handles.