How to inspect video codec and container information

What the browser knows

An HTML video element can often tell you duration, width, and height after metadata loads. It often cannot tell you a clean codec string. MediaInfo and ffprobe can. A website pretending to be ffprobe in phase one would lie a lot.

ConvertPass’s inspector reports what it can and estimates bitrate from size and duration. That estimate is labelled as an estimate.

What we tested

Capability detection is ‘can this browser fire loadedmetadata on this file’. A codec it cannot demux fails with a useful error, not a spinner forever — you can cancel.

When you need more

Use ffprobe locally for codec names, colour range, and audio layout. ConvertPass is the privacy-first first look, not a replacement for a desktop analyser.