How to Install QMediainfo in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

Both audio and video (images too) have a "secret" place called the Meta-Tag in which they hold information such as Artist/Album/Year, etc or if it's a picture the camera that captured it, etc ... type information that can be read by your OS once the proper applications are installed.

This information can be accessed via the the File manager of your Operating system. Concerning GNU/Linux, well after you install the proprietary codec pack, the OS can read certain amount of those details, say using the Nautilus file manager, but there are dedicated applications that lets you read/extract a lot of other advanced details.

There is a such an application called Mediainfo that has the ability to read advanced information from the container format of audio/video and even image files and lets you easily see them. If you use MS Windows then Mediainfo comes as a part of the excellent K-Lite codec pack but I don't think that we can easily install its GUI (although the command-line version is available via a PPA) in GNU/Linux.  

So I think after facing the same problem as others who tried to "extract" advanced info from multimedia files, I guess that a developer decided to use the already existing mediainfo command-line libraries and create a GUI front-end in Qt toolkit that is called QMediainfo!.

Qmediainfo lets you read advanced technical information from audio/video files such as ...

*. Year/Track/Artist/Category.

*. Bitrate related info such as - Max/Min and overall bitrate (average).

*. Screen resolution.

*. Encoding app/library.

*. Comments and ratings.

*. Codec ID.

*. Duration.

*. Aspect ratio.

*. Frames per second.

*. Audio channels, sample-rate, etc.

*. Language. 

*. Subtitles

*. Save the date to text/HTML file ... are just a few to mention.

As said it's written in the Qt-4 toolkit but works really well with Gnome desktop nonetheless. It depends on the Mediainfo library. So we'll have to make sure it's installed first. But we can just add the two PPA channels and the installation will take care the hassle for ya :).

You can install qmediainfo in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal (10.04 and 10.10) by using the below commands in your GNU/Linux Terminal.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:razrfalcon/qmediainfo

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:shiki/mediainfo

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install qmediainfo

That should do it. Unfortunately whenever you want these advanced information, you'll have to separately launch the app and drag-n-drop the files into it because it does not integrate to the Nautilus File manager (don't know how its with Dolphin - The KDE file manager :D).

You can start the app by searching for "qmediainfo" in Unity dash or use it in the command box (use "Alt" + "F2" keys). Big thanks to the developer. Nice work, love it.