MediaInfo

MediaInfo: Your Media File's Digital Autopsy Report

Frantically scrolling through corrupted video folders at 3 AM, I nearly threw my laptop when another editor asked "What's the bitrate on that MOV?" Then I discovered MediaInfo. That moment felt like finding surgical tools for media files—suddenly every pixel and frequency became transparent. This app doesn't just show specs; it reveals your media's DNA.

When troubleshooting a client's glitching footage, the container analysis saved my contract. Seeing duration and bitrate laid bare was like X-ray vision—I instantly spotted mismatched encoding that Premiere missed. That metadata section? It resurrected "lost" project files when album tags identified raw vocals from 2018.

During a color-grading nightmare last Tuesday, video dissection became my lifeline. Sweat dripped on my tablet as I checked chroma subsampling—discovering 4:2:0 instead of 4:2:2 explained the banding. That frame rate revelation? It fixed our drone footage jitter when playback insisted it was 30fps but MediaInfo exposed 29.97.

Audio mixing horror stories vanished with the sample rate detective. Remembering that session where dialogue tracks kept desyncing—headphones clamped tight—I finally saw conflicting 44.1kHz and 48kHz files. The relief when channel configuration exposed mono files masquerading as stereo? Better than espresso.

Foreign film projects transformed through subtitle forensics. That Swedish documentary had embedded subs MediaInfo detected as UTF-16—knowledge that prevented six hours of re-rendering. Chapter counts? They saved my podcast when I located interview markers I thought were deleted.

Rain lashed against my studio window last Thursday while I exported deliverables. Dragging an AVI into MediaInfo's tree view, branches unfolded showing Matroska layers within the container—like peeling digital onions. Exporting specs as text? Sent to audio techs mid-call when their system rejected "mystery" WAVs.

Command-line version runs on my server for batch checks. At dawn yesterday, SSH-ing into our archive while coffee brewed, I mass-verified FLAC bit depths—automating what took weeks manually. Email support replied in 90 minutes when I hit a rare OGG quirk.

The brilliance? Truthful limitations. When metadata fields stay empty, I know it's absent—not hidden. No false hopes. That integrity makes me trust its silence as much as its revelations.

What bites? GUI feels clinical—wish I could favorite frequent checks like "bitrate validator". Heavy M2TS files make my phone warm. But these pale when you're rescuing footage from the abyss.

Essential for: Post-houses verifying deliverables, podcasters diagnosing sync ghosts, archivists preserving legacy formats. If your workflow involves codec mysteries, install this before your next crisis.