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 'Serato Video 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:
Mac:
Windows:
2. Drag and drop a file or files from Finder/Explorer
The program will then generate information which will look like this:
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.
We now break this down into sections and explain what it all means.
The first few lines present information about the file itself including the location, the length of the media inside and the size of the files. The reference to Samplesand 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.
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.
We can also see that the video track has a resolution of 640x480.
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 the Perian H.264 Decoder will be tried first and version 30006 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.
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.
The final two lines provide information about the video framerate and keyframes in the video. From this we see that there are 282 keyframes and that they average once every 18.7 frames. As has been suggested in other articles the ideal would be to have keyframes once every 15-25 frames.