Determing contents of media containers like avi, mpeg?

[STurtle]

Is there an easy way to determine the contents of a media container (i.e. .avi,.mpeg,.mkv,...)?

I want to know which codecs are used for video and audio, whether the audio is surround or not, etc.

Of course, an editor or transcoder like avidemux can show me this information, but this is somewhat cumbersome. However, I cannot see a way to determine this information in Konqueror, Kaffeine nor Mplayer either.
(Ok, I am still on KDE 4.1, so maybe things have changed meanwhile?)

[microchip8]

Yes, MediaInfo which is also available for Linux, is in the Packman repo and has context-menu integration for KDE4

[STurtle]

Splendid! Exactly what I had been looking for, works nicely! Thanks!

[microchip8]

Yep, I use it all the time. It's not only for video's but for audio too and images also. All kinds of multimedia actually

[STurtle]

Yeah, I noticed that. Nice.

The only annoying thing is that the "easy" view does not show the resolution of an image, making it much less useful for pictures.

[microchip8]

I always click on "Text" view. Gives me everything about it

[oldcpu]

Reference mediainfo, I know its not very elegant, but I have a text (bash script) file in my /home/oldcpu/bin directory saved as "media" (and made executeable).

The file "media" is this:

#!/bin/bash
mediainfo $1 --Output=HTML > /home/oldcpu/temp/test.html
firefox /home/oldcpu/temp/test.html
rm /home/oldcpu/temp/test.html

Then for "somefile.avi" to find out more information I type:

media somefile.avi

Again, I know its not elegant, but I find having the output displayed in firefox is easier on my eyes than in the konsole. ... A sign of old age, I guess.

[microchip8]

Originally Posted by oldcpu

Reference mediainfo, I know its not very elegant, but I have a text (bash script) file in my /home/oldcpu/bin directory saved as "media" (and made executeable).

The file "media" is this:

#!/bin/bash
mediainfo $1 --Output=HTML > /home/oldcpu/temp/test.html
firefox /home/oldcpu/temp/test.html
rm /home/oldcpu/temp/test.html

Then for "somefile.avi" to find out more information I type:

media somefile.avi

Again, I know its not elegant, but I find having the output displayed in firefox is easier on my eyes than in the konsole. ... A sign of old age, I guess.

why through console? Mediainfo has KDE4 integration. Just go to your file, right-clock on it, choose open with mediainfo and you get all the info about it