Read What a Video File Knows About Itself
Drop a video in and you get its real properties back: resolution, duration, the container it was written in, an estimate of its bitrate, and, for phone footage, the date it was recorded and the exact spot on the map. All of it is read in your browser. The file never gets uploaded anywhere.
That last part is the whole reason to use a tool like this instead of the first “online metadata viewer” a search turns up. Most of those make you upload the file to their server first. For a clip your phone shot, that file can carry the coordinates of where you were standing, which is often your house. Handing that to a random site to read a resolution number is a bad trade.
What the File Tells You
The core properties come out fast, because the browser already reads them to play the video.
Resolution and aspect ratio come from the actual pixel dimensions, so a video labelled 1080p that was really upscaled from 720p shows its true size. Duration is exact. The container and MIME type tell you what you are actually holding, an MP4 is not always an MP4 inside, and a .mov from an iPhone behaves differently from a screen recording saved as WebM.
Bitrate here is an overall estimate, file size times eight divided by duration, not a per-stream read. It is the honest number for “is this file heavy for its length,” and I would not quote it as the exact video-track bitrate, because it folds in the audio and the container overhead too. If you need the precise per-track figure, that is a job for a desktop tool, and I will point you at one below.
Where the Date and Location Come From
This is the part most browser viewers skip, and it is the part people actually search for.
An MP4 or MOV file stores its housekeeping in a box called moov. Inside it, a small header called mvhd holds the creation and modification time, written as seconds since the first of January 1904 (QuickTime’s epoch, not Unix’s, which is why naive tools get the date wrong by 66 years). This tool reads that box directly and converts it, so you get the moment the camera actually wrote the file.
Phone videos go one better. Alongside the timing, iOS and Android write a location tag, a short ISO 6709 string like +37.7749-122.4194/, into the same moov tree. When it is there, you get the latitude and longitude and a link straight to the map. When a video has been stripped, re-encoded, or exported through an editor, that tag is usually gone, and the tool says so rather than guessing.
Because this reads the file’s own bytes with File.slice, it never loads a two-gigabyte movie into memory to do it. It reads the small header boxes, jumps over the giant media chunk, and stops once it has what it needs.
It Reads, It Does Not Edit
Worth being straight about this, because “video metadata editor online” is right next to “viewer” in the search box. This tool views. It does not change or remove anything.
If your goal is to strip the GPS out of a clip before you post it, that is a different operation, you have to rewrite the file, and doing it in a browser tab on a large video is slow and lossy. A desktop tool does that cleanly. What this is good for is the step before: seeing exactly what is in there so you know whether you need to strip it at all.
Checking a Video on Your Phone
“How to check video metadata on Android” is one of the common ways people land here, and the answer is that you do not need an app. Open this page in the phone’s browser, tap upload, pick the video from your gallery, and the same properties come back. It works the same on an iPhone. The file is read on the device, so a private clip stays on the device.
Browser Tool vs MediaInfo and ExifTool
If you want everything a file holds, the two serious tools are MediaInfo and ExifTool, and they go deeper than this does. MediaInfo will name the exact codec, the profile and level, the color space, the frame rate mode, and the per-stream bitrate. ExifTool, from a command line, will dump every last tag including ones no player cares about. If you are doing forensic work or debugging an encode, use them.
The catch is that MediaInfo means installing an app, and ExifTool means being comfortable in a terminal. This tool is the quick, no-install, nothing-uploaded version for the questions most people have: how big, how long, what shape, when, and where. For those, opening a browser tab beats installing software.
Beyond the Metadata
Once you know what the file is, the next step is usually to do something with it. To pull a still image out at a specific second, the video frame extractor saves frames as PNG or JPG in the browser. To find where the video cuts between shots, the video scene detector lists every scene with timecodes. And to understand the content rather than the container, the AI video analyzer reads what is happening on screen.
Recordings you keep can be transcribed by Whisper Large-v3 with SOC 2 Type 2 secure storage.
FAQ
How do I check where a video was recorded?
Upload the video here and look at the Location row. If the phone that shot it saved GPS into the file, you get the latitude and longitude and a link to the map. If the clip was edited, exported, or downloaded from a platform, the location was almost certainly removed, and no tool can recover what is not in the file.
Does this upload my video?
No. The file is read on your device with the browser’s own file and video APIs. Nothing is sent to a server, stored, or logged, which is the point of reading metadata locally rather than through an upload site.
Why is the recording date missing?
Recording date and location live in the MP4 and MOV container. If your file is a WebM, AVI, or MKV, or if it was re-encoded or exported through an editor, that container data is gone or was never written, so the field shows as not available. The resolution, duration, and size still read correctly.
Can it remove or edit the metadata?
No, this only reads it. Stripping GPS or changing tags means rewriting the file, which is a separate job better done in a desktop tool. Use this to see what is there first.
Is the bitrate exact?
It is an overall estimate, the file size over the duration, so it includes video, audio, and container overhead together. For the exact per-stream video bitrate, use MediaInfo or ExifTool.
What formats can it read?
Anything the browser can open reports its core properties: MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, and most AVI and MKV files. The recording date and GPS fields are specific to MP4 and MOV, since that is where that data is stored.
How is this different from an AI video analyzer?
Metadata is the technical description of the file: its size, shape, timing, and origin. AI video analysis reads the content, what is happening in the footage. This tool reads the file. The AI video analyzer watches the video.
