MediaInfo is one of the best tools around for giving you as much detail about a video file as you can handle.

Thankfully there are a few tools that that supply information about a video or audio file, and here are 5 free ones that are able to help you find out what codecs are necessary in order to play a video or audio file.

Of course, there are many pre-compiled codec packs around that contain many of the most popular codecs, but if you don’t want to download a whole pack to play 1 file then you just want the individual codec. Many multimedia players such as VLC, KMPlayer or Media Player Classic have their own codecs built in, but others don’t and this is where you need to get the correct codecs to play the file. A codec is simply a small program that’s used to encode or decode data, and you need them to play your multimedia files. If you’re having general issues playing video files then one of your codecs used to play the audio or video might be corrupted, but otherwise it might be that you don’t have the correct codec installed to play the file properly. Other times you might download the file and either get problems playing the video or audio portion which can be frustrating. Sometimes you might be unlucky and get a corrupted file either during the download or it wasn’t uploaded correctly, in which case you would have to re-download or try and repair the video file. With so many different types of video file available, when you download one from the internet, there’s always the possibility of a problem playing it properly.

Videoinspector freeware