For all of you audio and video freaks out there, here’s another great tool for you. Sometimes it’s a pain to determine what codec a media file uses. Last time, I wrote about being able to playback any video type with a collection of codecs.
Knowing what codec the file uses is important especially if you want to do some editing or conversion. You might even have mistakenly labeled a video file (say, an AVI) with another file type (like MPEG). So here’s GSpot, a freeware utility that tells the codec used to encode the AVI file like DivX or XviD, the version. It can also tell what type of MPEG codec is used (DVD format or not). It even displays additional file information like frame rates and other meta data.
One thing that sucks with this thing is that it can’t analyze proprietary codecs such as WMV, Real and Quicktime.
It runs on Windows 2000 and XP.
I have used both GSpot and Avicodec in the past, but neither app comes close to working as well as mediainfo – http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/
enjoy!
Thanks, Mack. Wrote another feature about it here: Windows Tip: More on How to Find Out What Codec a Media File Uses.