Disclaimer

The information provided in the following article intended as an educational resource and is provided as is. MovieInfoBatch is not considered one of the company's products and as a result does not offer any support for it. Should you have any questions about the operation of this product then you may post to the 'Video-SL General Discussion' area of the forum but a response is not guaranteed.

Intro

Video files are complex and there are many parameters that effect how they are encoded and decoded for play. Sometimes these can not easily be determined by just looking at the file and so this tool can help gather information about what is contained internally and what the computer will try to use to play the file.

Getting MovieInfoBatch

MovieInfoBatch is the name of the tool that provides this information and is available from the ScrachLIVE.net servers here:

MovieInfoBatch (Mac)

MovieInfoBatch (Win)

To get information

1. Launch the program

When you launch you will be greeted with one of the following screens depending on your platform:

2. Drag and drop a file or files from Finder/Explorer

The program will then generate information which will look like this:

Example Output (mac)

3. This information can be copied and pasted anywhere

Understanding the information presented

This section explains what some of the information that is displayed is. Most of the terminology that is used here has been defined in the glossary article.

An example of what the output may look like is presented here:

***********************************************************
/Users/Serato/Movies/Test vids/testright.mov
Length(s) 164.92 (Samples: 98952, Timescale: 600)
Size 14.62 MB 
Movie Tracks:
    VideoType: avc1 (H264 encoded by appl), 320x240 
      Component 1) ireP, H.264 (Perian) v.30002, Decompresses video stored in H.264 format.
      Component 2) lppa, H.264 Decoder v.40004, Decompresses images stored in the H.264 format.
Audio Tracks:
    AudioType: mp4a (44100kHz, 16bit)
      Component 1) lppa, MPEG-4 Audio v.10008, MPEG-4 Audio Decompressor component
Frame rate: 25.00 per second
Keyframes: 132 (min: 1, max: 171,avg: 31.2)
***********************************************************

We now break this down into sections and explain what it all means.

***********************************************************
/Users/Serato/Movies/Test vids/testright.mov
Length(s) 164.92 (Samples: 98952, Timescale: 600)
Size 14.62 MB 

The first few lines presents information about the file itself including the location, the length of the media inside and the size of the files. The reference to Samples and a Timescale tells us what Quicktime thinks is the overall timescale and number of samples for the file. The Timescale is the number of samples per second.

Movie Tracks:
    VideoType: avc1 (H264 encoded by appl), 320x240 
      Component 1) ireP, H.264 (Perian) v.30002, Decompresses video stored in H.264 format.
      Component 2) lppa, H.264 Decoder v.40004, Decompresses images stored in the H.264 format.

This says that there is one movie track found which has the codec of type 'avc1'. Every codec has a 4 character code and 'avc1' refers to the H.264 codec. Further information shows that the file is indeed H.264 and was encoded by 'appl' (encoders also have a 4 character code, in this case it would be Apple/Quicktime).

We can also see that the video track has a resolution of 320x420.

The next two lines do not refer to the movie itself but how Quicktime will try to decode it (in order of what components will be tried). In this case thePerian H.264 Decoder will be tried first and version 30002 is installed. The version number is unlikely to be the same as the package that was installed but can be referenced against known package versions.

Audio Tracks:
    AudioType: mp4a (44100kHz, 16bit)
      Component 1) lppa, MPEG-4 Audio v.10008, MPEG-4 Audio Decompressor component

Similar information is presented for audio data and in this case we can see we have 1 audio track which is 'mp4a'/AAC and is 44.1kHz/16bit. We can also see that Quicktime will be using Apple's own decompresser for this audio.

Frame rate: 25.00 per second
Keyframes: 132 (min: 1, max: 171,avg: 31.2)
***********************************************************

The final two lines provide information about the video framerate and keyframes in the video. From this we see that there are 132 keyframes and that they average once every 31 frames. As has been suggested in other articles the ideal would be to have keyframes once every 15-25 frames.