imageOne thing that’s always bugged me is that it’s hard to tell what codec’s been used on a video.  I’m sure there’s loads of ways out there to do it, but I’ve never really come up with a good way.  That is till I was trying to get something working in Media Browser.

A cool feature of Media Browser that doesn’t come out of the box with the normal install is information about the format of the video.  Things like the aspect ratio (4:3, 16:9 etc.) or about the codec (Divx, Xvid, Blu-Ray).  There is however a very simple way to set it up.  Media Browser looks for mediainfo.dll in the Windows\System32 directory.

Where though does that “mediabrowser.dll” come from?  It’s from a project on sourceforge just here Download the application, install it and copy the mediainfo.dll from the Programs folder into Windows\system32

But wait, how does that tell me about the codec I need.  The Media Info project itself is actually pretty cool.  Run the application point it at a video file and it’ll analyse it.  Finding out not only which codec it is, but also telling you where to get it.  Very useful.

Posted by Simon May, follow me on Twitter or if you like email me
Simon's Blog @ thedigitallifestyle.com

EDIT: This is how it looks in Media Center
4 thoughts on “Media browser video information, and a quick way to workout which codec you need”
  1. Cool.. how does it look in Media Browser? Does it just do an overlay on the thumbnail or is there another screen you go to to see the info?

  2. Just FYI, you don’t need to run the media info installer. You can simply download the mediainfo.dll and place it in the windows\system32 folder.

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