It sometimes can be difficult to find out why a video is not playing properly on a computer system.
This is even more problematic for inexperienced users who usually solve the problem by installing a codec pack on their system.
That’s obviously not the best way of dealing with the matter as the installation of codec packs can lead to incompatibilities and system errors.
Experienced users work with video players like KMPlayer or VLC that play almost every video file out of the box.
Users who use video players like Windows Media Player that rely on system wide codecs on the other hand can use a software program like Video Inspector to analyze videos and get information about required codecs that may be missing to play them on the system.
The tool can be integrated in the Windows Explorer context menu to display information about the selected video file directly.
The alternative is to use the interface to browse the computer system for supported video files. It covers the popular AVI, Matroska, MPEG I, MPEG II and QuickTime containers which means it cannot identify other video formats like wmv.
Information about the video codec and audio codec are displayed immediately after loading a video into the software program. Various information about the video are displayed including the codecs used. Probably more important than that is the visual aid that is telling the user if the proper codecs are installed to play the video. A download button is present in case they are not to immediately download them to the computer system (using codecsdb.com).
Video Inspector comes with a few extra tools and options that include displaying all installed audio and video codecs on the system, burning or converting the video to DVD, extracting the audio, splitting the video or changing the FourCC.
There has been some bad blood lately about products published by KC Softwares as they started adding Relevant Knowledge to their software programs. Relevant Knowledge actively monitors a user’s browsing and purchases on the Internet. Many spyware and antivirus companies therefore classify Relevant Knowledge as spyware.
It has to be noted that Relevant Knowledge is only included in the full builds of the program. A lite version is provided on the same download page that does not include this component.
Viable alternatives to Video Inspector are G-Spot, AviCodec, Media Info or Codec Installer.