See what a video file is hiding
Drop an MP4 or MOV to reveal the device that shot it, when and where it was recorded, and every technical detail of the picture and sound — read entirely in your browser.
Drop a video to read its metadata
Only the file's header is read — never the footage itself, and nothing is uploaded.
Where video metadata actually lives
An MP4 file is a stack of labelled boxes. One of them, mdat, holds the footage and accounts for essentially the entire file size. A much smaller one called moov describes everything about it — and that is where the identifying information sits:
- Device — the make and model of the phone or camera, and often the software version that encoded the file.
- Location — latitude, longitude and altitude, written as an ISO 6709 point. Android stores it in a
©xyzatom; iPhone uses a key namedcom.apple.quicktime.location.ISO6709. - Timestamps — when recording started and when the file was last modified. iPhone additionally keeps the local UTC offset, which tells you the time zone the camera was standing in.
- Picture and sound — codec, resolution, frame rate, bitrate, rotation, audio channels and sample rate, one entry per track.
The viewer separates the identifying tags from the technical ones, because they answer very different questions. Resolution and codec describe the picture. Device, location and date describe you — and those are the ones worth checking before you send a file to anyone.
Nothing is uploaded
The file stays on your machine. The reader walks the box headers and loads only the small descriptive section, so the footage itself is never read into memory, never re-encoded and never transmitted.
Frequently asked questions
Do videos have EXIF data?
Not EXIF exactly. Photos use EXIF; MP4 and MOV videos store the same kind of information in a header box called moov, using QuickTime and ISO Base Media atoms instead. The content is comparable — device make and model, the moment of recording, GPS coordinates — so this tool reads that structure and presents it the same way an EXIF viewer would.
Which video formats can I inspect?
MP4, MOV, M4V and 3GP — the ISO Base Media family that phones, action cameras, drones and dashcams all record in. MKV, WebM and AVI use entirely different container structures and are not supported yet.
Will a huge 4K file crash my browser?
No. The viewer never loads the video. Every box in the file states its own length, so the reader hops over the picture data without touching it and reads only the small header. A four-gigabyte clip is inspected as quickly as a four-megabyte one.
Why does my video show no location?
Location is only written if the camera app had permission at the time of recording. It is also commonly stripped when a video is shared: messaging apps, social platforms and most editing exports drop the metadata boxes entirely. A file that has been through any of those will read as clean.
What is the rotation value for?
Phones record sideways and store a rotation angle in the track header rather than turning the pixels. Players read that angle and rotate on playback. When a video appears rotated in one app but correct in another, this field is usually the reason.