MediaTab adds media information to Windows Explorer's Properties window

Depending on how you play or view media files on your system, you may never run into any issues playing or viewing them, or experience issues occasionally were files cannot be loaded because of a missing codec or other issues.

That's for instance the case if you use Windows Media Player to play multimedia files on the operating system. The issue here is that Windows Media Player can only play certain types of media files and requires codecs for any other file type that it does not support out of the box.

So what can you do if you run into such a situation? You can switch players to VLC Media Player or SMPlayer for example, but that is probably not something that you may want to do.

Another option is to install a codec pack and hope for the best. The problem here is that these packs install a number of codecs, which is overkill considering that you only need one or two (audio and video) to play the file.

A third option is to use a program like Video Inspector or Codec Toolbox to find out which codec is missing to play the multimedia file.

The free program MediaTab falls into the third group of applications. What sets it apart is that it does not need to be executed manually whenever you run into playback issues. Instead, it adds itself to Windows Explorer's Properties window that you can access with a right-click and the selection of Properties from the context menu, or by holding down the Alt-key and double-clicking on the file. Or, if you prefer to use the keyboard, Alt-Enter and then Ctrl-Tab.

All information are listed on the MediaTab tab which it adds to the window. As far as information go that it displays, they are very extensive and may intimidate on first glance.

There is no need for that though as you only need to look at some values to find out why something does not play on your system. That's not the only use case for MediaTab though.

You can find out lots of information about it, from the video bitrate to audio compression or stream size. It is possible to export the information to a text or HTML file, or copy them to the clipboard in various formats instead.

MediaTab limits the information that it displays somewhat at first. You need to click on the advanced link in the program window to display all information instead.

Closing Words

MediaTab is a useful program for Windows that provides you with everything there is to know about media files on your system.

The program is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

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