How to determine which codec a video is encoded in

[andrew clarke]

On Mon 2010-07-05 12:27:17 UTC+0300, Dotan Cohen (dotancohen at gmail.com) wrote:

> I have some video files that I need to know what codec is used to
> decode them. I know that the Windows software G-spot will help, is
> there anything for Linux / Ubuntu? I have googled and found nothing,
> and the ffmpeg manpage does not give any information on the topic. I
> even tried "strings" on the files but that yielded nothing useful!

MediaInfo.  There is a command-line and GUI version.

http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en

It is not currently in the Ubuntu repos, but you can install it from
the MediaInfo PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shiki/mediainfo
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mediainfo

Regards
Andrew