MediaInfo

MediaArea publishes MediaInfo under its own BSD-style licence, the MediaInfo(Lib) License, in three forms: a graphical program, a command line program and a library for other software. The site lists Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and a long row of Linux distributions, plus Flatpak and Snap packages. The containers it reads include MPEG-4, QuickTime, Matroska, AVI, MPEG program and transport streams, MXF, WMV and FLV. Video codecs include MPEG-1 and 2, H.263, MPEG-4 Visual, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC and FFV1. Audio includes MPEG Audio and MP3, AC-3, DTS, AAC and FLAC. Subtitle formats such as CEA-608 and 708, DVB, Teletext, SRT, SSA/ASS and SAMI are recognised. Tags in ID3v1 and v2, Vorbis comments and APE are shown. Views are text, sheet, tree and HTML and the results export to text, CSV and HTML.

The forensic interest lies in the encoding details. A file carries the name and settings of the library that wrote it, encoded and tagged dates, the frame rate mode and the stream layout. A video said to have come straight from a phone but carrying the settings string of a desktop encoder needs explaining. Two files from the same DVR should share a structure, and one that differs stands out. MediaInfo reports what the container declares, which can be edited, and it does not decode frames, so it sits beside ExifTool for the metadata tags and ffprobe for frame-level timing. It is also the quickest way to document a batch of exports: the command line version runs over a folder and writes one record per file into the case. Proprietary DVR formats that are not standard containers mostly fall outside its reach.