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I’ve seen many cases that movies downloaded from Internet can’t be played properly… A normal downloaded movie is around 700MB and it takes hours to complete downloading it. It’s surely frustrating that you wasted hours downloading a movie that you eagerly want to watch but then you only get the sound but no video. Or, you get only the video but no sound. You’ll be cursing the person who rip the video and uploaded the video file.

Before doing that and deleting the downloaded movie away, you are very likely to be able to play the movie perfectly together with the audio and video IF you have the correct codec installed. A codec is a device or program capable of performing encoding and decoding on a digital data stream or signal. Different rippers use different codecs to rip the movie off a CD or DVD. So in order to play correctly, you need to install the codec that’s used to rip the disc.

Thankfully there are a few good tools that that supplies technical and tag information about a video or audio file.


I found 3 free tools that is able to tell you what codec is necessary in order to play a video or audio file.

1. MediaInfo

When you load a movie file into MediaInfo, it’ll give you the following information.
General: title, author, director, album, track number, date, duration…
Video: codec, aspect, fps, bitrate…
Audio: codec, sample rate, channels, language, bitrate…
Text: language of subtitle
Chapters: number of chapters, list of chapters

I like this tool as it’s not very complicated by giving you the unnecessary information. Simply load the movie file, it’ll detect what video and audio required to play. There’s a button on the main interface where you can click to go to the official website of the video codec or audio codec. Download the codec, install it and you’re all set to watch the downloaded video.

[ Download MediaInfo ]

2. AVIcodec

AVIcodec is able to tell you the codec required and where to download it. It is able to read AVI & DIVX, ASF & WMV, Real (.rm, .rmvb), Ogg (.ogg, .ogm), Mpeg-(S)VCD-DVD (.mpg, .vob), FLV and all those handled by DirectShow (.mp3, …). Just load the video or audio file, and it will show you the information. Clicking on the small “web” button will bring you to the official website to download the codec.

Current AVIcodec version is quite outdated. There’s a newer version for beta test which is said to be available till end of March 2007, but it’s still available. Looks like AVIcodec is not actively being developed.

[ Download AVIcodec ]

3. afreeCodecVT

Easily determine the Audio and Video codec required to view your video. Once the codec or problem is determined; you may easily search for the codec or tool to solve your issue using the software.

Only reads AVI files. It doesn’t bring you to the official website to download the required codecs. Searching for codec download links in afreeCodec and afreeDLL doesn’t work. The link where it says “View a scenario in which afreeCodecVT is used to solve a issue.” in HELP section doesn’t work. Codec wizard doesn’t work as well. A lot of function in this tool will bring you to afreeCodecVT’s website but I think the website has changed and this tool doesn’t point to the correct page.

[ Download afreeCodecVT ]

4. GSpot

There is no need to install GSpot. Just download, extract and run GSpot.exe. GSpot is able to tell you whether you’ve installed the codec required to play the movie file you examine. If it says “Codec(s) are Installed”, then you can play without problems. If it says “Codec(s) are NOT Installed”, then you have to manually search for the codecs in Google. Would be nice if it has a database of direct link to download the required codecs.

[ Download GSpot ]

From all 4 codec recognition tools above, I prefer to use MediaInfo. It is able to support many types of files and recognize many codecs. MediaInfo is actively being developed and don’t require any installation. It also brings you to the correct website to download the official required codec.

Update: Sorry guys, totally forgotten about GSpot which is the most famous of them all. Just updated this post with GSpot.

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