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Technical Information of Video and Audio Files

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:15:11 +0000

Your friend said it is a great movie but the damn thing won´t play in your computer. The screen remains black and you hear no audio at all. Many users tend to download a huge codec package and install it on their system. Sure, the movie most likely plays fine after this method but it seems a bit like an overkill if installing one single codec would have lead to the same result.

MediaInfo scans a video or audio file and displays its technical and tag information. Information include general information like title, author and duration but also relevant information about the audio and video codec used to create the file. The freeware provides a link to a player who is playing that file and a link to the codec if you already have a favorite player.

The supported formats list is to large to be listed here at ghacks, take a look at the MediaInfo supported formats list for a complete listing. A similar tool is Gspot which offers basically the same functionality and is freeware as well.

Both tools offer in depth information about the analysed file which help if you encounter other problems, for example bitrate related problems.

Cbreak Remove Commercials from Avi Files

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 17:27:44 +0000

More and more people use their computer to record tv shows by simply installing a tv card into it and connecting the computer to the tv signal. The only problem they are now facing is that everything will be recorded and everything includes those unnecessary commercials. The freeware application cbreak helps you to remove those commercials from the recored avi files.

Cbreak works by scanning every frame of a video file, taking note of any black frames in the video. It uses these frames to divide the video up into segments.

Once the segments are established, it has two modes that it can operate in:

In autonomic mode, it discards any video segments shorter than a certain time length (60 seconds is the default).

In manual mode, it plays each segment for you and asks whether it should keep it or not.

When all this is done, it copies the good video segments into a new AVI file along with the corresponding audio. Pretty great, huh? You can also change any of the parameters Cbreak uses to make decisions about a video stream, so it can be adjusted to your specific needs.