The questions a video file will not answer by itself
A file manager tells you a video’s name, size and duration. Everything that actually determines whether it will play, edit or upload cleanly is invisible from there.
Which codec is inside, which is different from the container extension. What the real resolution is, as opposed to how it appears after rotation. What frame rate it was shot at. What the bitrate is, which decides whether it is worth compressing further. Whether there is an audio track at all, and in what format.
Those are the questions this page answers. It is deliberately read only, so it inspects and reports and never touches the file.
Inspecting a file
- Drop a video onto the box. Thirteen container extensions are accepted, one file at a time.
- Wait for the engine to load, which is the slow part on the first file in a session.
- Read the report, laid out as container, video stream and audio stream sections.
- Download it as a text file if you want to keep it next to the video.
Container and codec are different things
The single most useful thing this report clears up is the difference between the wrapper and what is inside it.
The extension names the container, which is the packaging. The codec is the compression scheme used for the actual picture, and the two vary independently. Two files both called .mp4 can hold entirely different codecs, and one of them may play everywhere while the other is refused by the same software. When a video will not open, this mismatch is the explanation far more often than genuine corruption.
The report names both, with the video codec’s profile alongside it where the file declares one, because profile is what a hardware decoder actually checks against.
Rotation, and why the resolution looks wrong
Portrait video from a phone is one of the most confusing things in this report until you know how it works.
The camera records landscape frames and writes a display matrix into the file saying rotate this on playback. Players honour it, so the video appears upright. The stored resolution, however, is the landscape one, which is why a portrait clip is reported as wider than it is tall.
The report shows the rotation as its own line whenever the file carries one, which turns an apparently wrong resolution into an explained one. It also matters practically, because some editing software ignores the flag and shows the video sideways, and knowing the flag exists points straight at the cause. Rotate Video is the tool for changing it.
Where the bitrate figure comes from
The report always names the source of the overall bitrate, and there are two.
Some containers record it directly, and where they do that figure is used and labelled as container reported. Others do not, and in that case the file size is divided by the duration and the result is labelled as an estimate.
Both are useful and they are not the same thing, which is why they are distinguished. A container reported figure is what the file claims. An estimate derived from size and duration includes container overhead and averages across a variable bitrate encode. Being told which one you are looking at is the difference between a number and a fact.
What comes after the diagnosis
If the file is large for its content, the bitrate figure is what tells you so, and Compress Video reduces it. If the codec is the problem rather than the size, Video Converter re-encodes to a widely playable target and MKV to MP4 covers the specific case of a container nothing will open.
For the equivalent inspection of a photo rather than a video, EXIF Viewer reads camera and location metadata from an image file. The rest are on the video hub.
