Native macOS app · Since 2011
Complete codec and stream metadata, real frame thumbnails, bitrate graphs, fixity checksums, and polished PDF reports — everything a media file has to tell, one drag and drop away.
Requires macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon & Intel
The original · Since 2011
Media Inspector is a native Mac app that shows everything inside a video or audio file — and measures what the metadata only claims.
Drop in a movie, a recording or a delivery master and it lays out the container and every stream in it: codec, resolution, frame rate, bit depth, color and HDR format, audio channels, subtitles and chapters. Then it goes past the labels — measuring loudness, HDR light levels and bitrate from the content itself, checking files against delivery policies, and turning it all into branded PDF and HTML reports.
It has been on the Mac since 2011. What began as a small freeware tool joined the Mac App Store in March 2011, weeks after the store opened, and has since been rebuilt from scratch as Media Inspector 3 — fully native on Apple silicon and Intel. Editors, post-production and broadcast QC teams, archivists and collectors use it for one job: knowing exactly what is in a file before it ships, plays or goes on the shelf.
A small freeware tool for checking what was inside a video file — and quickly a favorite among video people.
Media Inspector 1.0 arrives on the Mac App Store, weeks after the store opened.
A redesigned second generation with text export and right-click Finder integration, updated through 2014.
Rewritten from scratch as a new app for modern macOS, native on Apple silicon.
Loudness, HDR light levels and Dolby Vision measured from the essence, conformance policies, QC reports and Shortcuts automation.
“Insanely useful if you work in the video space… If you work with different video content a lot, you totally need this.”
“It gives you every detail you could possibly want about the audio and video codecs for a particular file.”
“I was recommended this app on a one-to-one session in the Apple Store, Bristol. It’s been SO valuable on many occasions.”
“Speed, integration into the right-click menu, and simplicity make this application great. I use it every day.”
What's new
Reports, rebuilt: six purpose-built documents in a new Export Report window — and every measurement Media Inspector takes, now on paper. Plus audio checked in every sample, and HDR light levels held to what the file declares.
QC Report, Spec Sheet, Archival Report, Contact Sheet, Delivery Manifest and Comparison Report, each built to answer one question — in a new three-pane Export Report window that now hosts the Text, JSON and CSV metadata exports too.
Check a file against any conformance policy and get PASS, PASS WITH WARNINGS or FAIL, every issue with what was actually found, and a sign-off block with signature lines and Approved / Rejected boxes.
Bit rate, loudness, true peak, MaxCLL and MaxFALL are measured from the essence and printed beside what the file claims — Matches, Differs by +160%, or Not declared.
One page in plain words: a hero frame, a headline like “4K · HDR10 · 23.976 fps”, the picture and file details, and every audio and subtitle track — always exactly one page.
Every file in one table, with totals, a pass / warn / fail tally and checksums in full — plus a CSV export with raw seconds and bytes for your spreadsheet or MAM.
Two or three files side by side, differences first — master against proxy, before and after a transcode — with an optional SHA-256 check for byte-identical copies.
When a section needs loudness, light levels, bit rate or checksums, the measurement starts on its own and shows its progress. Exports wait for it, so a finished report never contains a placeholder.
A brand kit in Settings — name, logo, accent color, contact line — styles every report. Export a vector PDF, PNG or JPEG pages, a self-contained HTML file that reads well on a phone, or CSV for tables.
Generate Report now takes a report type, a policy and a format — PDF, HTML or CSV. Manifests and comparisons turn every input file into one document, and existing shortcuts keep working.
The analysis that draws the waveform and measures loudness now finds what metadata can't: silent or duplicated channels, mono phase cancellation, dropouts with their timecodes, and silence at the start, the end and in between.
A new policy checks declared MaxCLL and MaxFALL against the measured picture: it fails files more than 10% brighter than they claim, and warns when the values look like boilerplate.
Eighteen built-in policies in seven groups, now covering HD streaming masters, Dolby Vision profile 8, US broadcast and streaming loudness, and caption line limits for 608 and TTML.
Drop in a file and get an instant, beautifully organized breakdown of what it really contains.
Container, video, audio, subtitle, chapter, and image streams — codecs, profiles, bit rates, color primaries, HDR, chroma, languages, and more.
A grid of real frames decoded straight from the video stream, evenly spread across the timeline, with optional timecodes.
Embedded artwork is extracted losslessly from the container, displayed beside the metadata, and saved back to disk in its original bytes.
QC verdicts, client spec sheets, archival records, contact sheets, delivery manifests and comparisons — branded, measured, and exported as vector PDF.
Fully sandboxed and 100% offline. No analytics, no network access — your files never leave your Mac.
A modern SwiftUI app built for Apple silicon and Intel. Fast, light, and at home on macOS.
Fully localized in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Russian, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.
Every property MediaInfo knows, with per-stream toggles for what shows on screen and what makes it into printed reports.
Open a whole folder's worth of files — each stays in the sidebar with its format badges, one click from comparison.
One pass charts every stream's bitrate plus the container total — spot VBR spikes, starved sections, and encoding problems at a glance.
MD5 and SHA-256 computed in a single streaming pass — copy them, print them on reports, and carry them in every export.
Machine-readable metadata with raw and formatted values and stable keys — ready for MAM ingest, catalogs, and spreadsheets.
Integrated loudness, loudness range and true peak, measured from the audio to ITU-R BS.1770-4 — with a short-term curve for the whole programme.
MaxCLL and MaxFALL measured from the picture and compared with what the file declares — across HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision.
Flip two switches and every file measures itself on open — audio waveform, loudness and bitrate, video HDR light levels — with the results already on screen.
Metadata
Media Inspector reads what's actually inside the container — every stream, every property — and formats each value the way humans read it: Mb/s, timecodes, byte sizes, dates.
Audio
Every audio stream draws a waveform with one lane per channel — and Media Inspector measures its loudness to the EBU R128 standard from the decoded audio itself, never from metadata.
HDR & Dolby Vision
Media Inspector decodes the picture and measures its real light levels — MaxCLL and MaxFALL in nits — then shows them next to the values the file declares. When an encoder ships zeros or boilerplate, you see it immediately.
Conformance
Describe what your files are supposed to be — codec, resolution, frame rate, channels — and every open file gets a pass/fail verdict, with failures explaining exactly what was found versus what was expected.
The policy editor: every rule composed from menus — severity, stream scope, property, operator, value. Policies are shareable files.
Thumbnails
Frames are decoded directly from the video stream itself — no guesswork, no proxies — and laid out on an adjustable grid with frame-accurate timecodes.
Comparison
Select two or three files and the inspector becomes a diff: every property side by side, streams paired automatically, and only the real differences highlighted.
Reports
Pick the document the job calls for. The Export Report window previews it live, measures whatever it needs on its own, and exports a crisp vector PDF in your brand — for one file or a whole delivery.
Real exports, made by Media Inspector from demo files with a sample brand kit. Download any PDF to judge the full quality.
Exports
Reports are for people; exports are for pipelines. Every inspection leaves the app in whichever shape the next tool needs.
macOS Integrations
Open anything straight from Finder, and drive batch analysis, reports and checksums from native Shortcuts actions.
Archives & collections
Archival facilities, film and tape archives, post houses, and serious collectors — Media Inspector turns every ingest into documentation you can file, print, and trust.
Add your own fields to every report — facility, original media, catalog number, barcode — and they render as a dedicated card right below the file summary.
Confirm a digitization came out right — codec, bit rate, bit depth, color, HDR metadata — then seal it with MD5/SHA-256 fixity checksums before the source tape goes back on the shelf.
Contact sheets give each asset a recognizable face — spot the right master at a glance and catch corrupted or black frames without scrubbing.
Your brand kit — company name, logo, accent color and contact line — on every report, so the paperwork looks like it came from your facility, because it did.
Export a vector PDF for the digital catalog, a high-resolution image for the MAM or the tape box, or print it and drop it in the physical file.
Fully offline and sandboxed — nothing is uploaded, ever. Use it on air-gapped ingest stations and restricted facility networks with confidence.
Media Inspector is fully sandboxed and works completely offline. It has no network access, collects no analytics, and phones home to no one. Everything happens on your machine — as it should.
Read the privacy policy →Everything its FFmpeg and MediaInfo engines can parse: MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, MXF, MPEG-TS, and DVD-Video among the containers, with video codecs from H.264, HEVC, AV1, ProRes and VP9 to MPEG-2, and audio from Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital and DTS-HD to AAC, FLAC, Opus, MP3 and PCM. If a file plays somewhere, Media Inspector can almost certainly dissect it.
Media Inspector is built on MediaInfoLib — the same open-source engine behind MediaInfo — wrapped in a fully native macOS app. It also goes beyond metadata: real decoded frame thumbnails, embedded cover-art extraction, and branded, print-ready PDF reports.
No. Media Inspector is fully sandboxed and works completely offline — it has no network access, no analytics, and no telemetry. Everything is analyzed locally on your machine.
Yes. The Contact Sheet report lays real decoded frames on the page with frame-accurate timecodes under a header of key facts, and exports as a vector PDF or a high-resolution PNG or JPEG image — ready for a MAM system, a catalog, or a printed folder.
Over 1,500 properties across container, video, audio, subtitle, chapter and image streams. You choose per stream type which properties appear on screen and which are included in printed reports.
Yes. Media Inspector computes MD5 and SHA-256 in a single streaming pass — on demand or automatically on open — shows them on the Container tab, prints them on QC, Archival and Delivery Manifest reports, and includes them in JSON and CSV exports.
Yes. A single pass over the file charts the bitrate of every stream plus the container total — the combined graph on the Container tab, per-stream graphs on the Video and Audio tabs — and the graph prints on the QC and Archival reports.
Yes. Alongside PDF and plain-text reports, every inspection exports as machine-readable JSON (raw and formatted values with stable keys) or a flat CSV — ready for MAM ingest, catalogs, and spreadsheets.
It turns every ingest into filing-ready documentation. The Archival Report combines full per-stream metadata — enough to verify that a digitization came out right before the source tape goes back on the shelf — with fixity checksums, measured loudness and light levels, custom provenance fields and your facility's branding. The Contact Sheet gives every asset a recognizable visual fingerprint, and the Delivery Manifest logs a whole ingest batch in one table, with a CSV for the catalog.
Yes. A brand kit in Settings — company name, logo, accent color and a contact line — styles every report, and custom fields carry whatever your workflow needs (Facility, Original Media, Catalog Number, Barcode…). Save a report's setup as a preset and a whole collection gets consistent documentation.
Yes. Media Inspector has no network capability at all — analysis, reports, and exports all happen locally, so it behaves identically on ingest stations and QC workstations that never touch the internet. Nothing is uploaded, logged, or phoned home.
Media Inspector requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later and runs natively on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs. The app is localized in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Russian, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.
Yes. It ships four native Shortcuts actions — Analyze Media File (to JSON or CSV), Generate Report (any of the six reports as PDF, HTML or CSV, by report type or from a saved preset, with an optional conformance policy), Compute File Checksum (MD5 or SHA-256), and Open in Media Inspector. Chain them into your own workflows, run them from a Finder right-click as Quick Actions, or drive them from automations — all without opening the app.
Yes — the actions are batch-aware. Select many files and run a Quick Action, or hand a whole folder to a shortcut, and Media Inspector produces one report, export, or checksum per file in a single pass — or one Delivery Manifest for the whole batch. A whole tape collection or ingest batch becomes a single command instead of an afternoon of clicking.
Yes. The Generate Report Shortcuts action renders the same reports as the app — pick a report type, a policy and a format, or use a saved preset — entirely in the background. Trigger it from a Finder Quick Action, a keyboard shortcut, or a folder-based automation, and the finished files land wherever you point them.
Yes. The QC Report checks a file against a conformance policy — one of the built-ins or your own — and prints PASS, PASS WITH WARNINGS or FAIL, every failed rule with what was actually found, a measured-versus-declared table for bit rate, loudness and HDR light levels, and a sign-off block with signature lines and Approved / Rejected boxes. Any measurement the report needs runs automatically before it exports.
Yes. Select several files and the Delivery Manifest lists them in one table — container, duration, resolution, codecs, audio, size, checksums and verdict — with totals and a CSV export. The Comparison Report puts two or three files side by side and lists only what differs, with an optional SHA-256 check that proves two copies are byte-identical.
Yes. Every report also exports as one self-contained HTML file — images and charts inlined, no JavaScript — that reads well on a phone and prints cleanly from any browser. Handy for emailing a QC result or posting a spec sheet to a review portal.
The complete media analyzer for your Mac — available now on the Mac App Store.
Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later · Universal binary for Apple silicon and Intel