If you download a media file – be it video or audio file, and it refuses to play then you might have to install the correct codecs to play that media file. But which codecs should be installed is not very easy to find. Most of the times, you try installing this codec pack and that codec pack but without showing any results, other than installing hundreds of useless codecs on your system. Thanks to a small Windows Explorer extension called MediaTab, now you can easily view the media information for any file in its File Properties dialog. This information can then be used to find which codecs are missing from your system and you can download them from the internet.
You can get MediaTab from the website of MediaArea. The download is a setup installer which works in both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. After the installation, you can start using MediaTab right away. To view the media information, all you have to do is right-click on a file and select Properties from the context menu. In the File Properties window that shows up, you will find a new tab labeled Media Tab. Upon selecting this tab, you would see all the detailed information for that media file.
The information can be displayed in the basic mode or the advanced mode. The basic mode displays information regarding the audio and video sampling rates, frames, codec names, codec IDs and so on. The advanced mode displays the codec name, the codec website and the download URL in addition to the information displayed in the basic mode.
Moreover, you can choose to display the information either in the text mode or in the tree-view mode. You can also export the information to a text file or a an HTML file. The information can also be copied to the Windows clipboard.
The MediaTab Windows Explorer extension makes it very easy to find the media information for your media files. It works completely unobtrusively and sometimes also gives the URLs from where you can download the codecs. Even if the URLs are not disclosed, you can always Google the codec names and find them.
You can download MediaTab from http://mediatab.mediaarea.net/.