HOWTO: compiling mediainfo (CLI & GUI) on Ubuntu

Today, I will cover a must-have tool for anyone who likes to play with audio / video transcoding : mediainfo.

Indeed, mediainfo will tell you everything you need to know about the format and properties of basically any type of picture, audio or video file.

For instance:

ubuntu% mediainfo video.mpg 
General
Complete name                    : video.mpg
Format                           : MPEG-PS
File size                        : 41.8 MiB
Duration                         : 2mn 59s
Overall bit rate                 : 1 954 Kbps

Video
ID                               : 224 (0xE0)
Format                           : MPEG Video
Format version                   : Version 1
Format settings, Matrix          : Default
Duration                         : 2mn 59s
Bit rate mode                    : Constant
Bit rate                         : 1 594 Kbps
Nominal bit rate                 : 1 700 Kbps
Width                            : 352 pixels
Height                           : 288 pixels
Display aspect ratio             : 4/3
Frame rate                       : 25.000 fps
Scan type                        : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)               : 0.629

Audio
ID                               : 192 (0xC0)
Format                           : MPEG Audio
Format version                   : Version 1
Format profile                   : Layer 2
Duration                         : 2mn 59s
Bit rate mode                    : Constant
Bit rate                         : 224 Kbps
Channel(s)                       : 2 channels
Sampling rate                    : 44.1 KHz
Resolution                       : 16 bits
Video delay                      : 280ms

And the '-f' flag (for full) will tell you even more! Now you that you're convinced, let's install it :) mediainfo is available both as a command-line tool and as a graphical tool, so I'll show you both installations on Ubuntu 8.04.

1) Installing the command-line version

This is very straightforward:

ubuntu% wget http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/mediainfo/MediaInfo_CLI_0.7.8_GNU_FromSource.tar.bz2
ubuntu% bzip2 -d MediaInfo_CLI_0.7.8.tar.bz2
ubuntu% tar xvf MediaInfo_CLI_0.7.8_GNU_FromSource.tar

ubuntu% cd MediaInfo_CLI_0.7.8_GNU_FromSource
ubuntu% sh CLI_Compile.sh
ubuntu% cd MediaInfo/Project/GNU/CLI
ubuntu% sudo make install

Done :) You can now invoke the 'mediainfo' command.

2) Installing the graphical version

The GUI of mediainfo is based on wxWindows, a cross-platform toolkit for GTK (the X Window toolkit), Windows and MacOS.

In our case, we will use GTK, so let's start with the installation of the GTK development library:

ubuntu% sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev

Then, let's install the wxWidgets library, used by the mediainfo GUI. First, we need to update the list of APT repositories by adding the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://apt.wxwidgets.org/ hardy-wx main

Now, let's update the package list and fetch the wxWidgets package:

ubuntu% sudo apt-get update
ubuntu% sudo apt-get install libwxgtk2.8-0

Now we're ready to build the GUI version of mediainfo:

ubuntu% wget http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/mediainfo/MediaInfo_GUI_0.7.8_GNU_FromSource.tar.bz2
ubuntu% bzip2 -d MediaInfo_GUI_0.7.8.tar.bz2
ubuntu% tar xvf MediaInfo_GUI_0.7.8_GNU_FromSource.tar

ubuntu% cd MediaInfo_GUI_0.7.8_GNU_FromSource
ubuntu% sh GUI_Compile.sh
ubuntu% cd MediaInfo/Project/GNU/GUI
ubuntu% sudo make install

The GUI version of mediainfo is now available using the 'mediainfo-gui' command.

That's it for the installation of mediainfo. I'm sure you'll find this tool extremely useful and I'll definitely use it in future posts to illustrate audio & video formats.