In general, HandBrake or ffmpeg are sufficient to know the details of a media file and start the job. However, there are some specific cases where you may want to know more. for example, what if the lengths of the audio and video files (muxed together) are different and you need to take care of that? You can never be too careful!
mediainfo is a handy utility that can alert you beforehand. It displays tons of information about a media file and is a nice utility for a quick inspection. It comes with a nice GUI too (we will discuss the cli utility in this article)
Features
- Information on container, video, audio, subtitles and chapters
- Fetches information from meta tags
- Supports many many of file formats
- View information in different formats (text, sheet, tree, HTML…)
- Customize viewing formats
- Export information as text, CSV, HTML…
- GUI, CLI, library available
- Shell integration
- Multi-platform: Linux, Windows, Mac
Installation
To install mediainfo on Ubuntu, run:
$ sudo apt-get install mediainfo
Or, for the gui:
$ sudo apt-get install mediainfo-gui
Usage
It’s as simple as it gets:
$ mediainfo myvideo.mp4
For full information:
$ mediainfo -f myvideo.mp4
However, there are more options. To see all available options:
$ mediainfo --Help
Rating
Features: 4.5/5
Usability: 4.5/5
Webpage: mediainfo
