Show Video Codecs

This article shows several methods for displaying video (and audio) file codec information, both on the console and through a graphical user interface.

mplayer
Most mplayer frontends (such as smplayer) have an option to display the codec information, or show the mplayer logs, which display similar information.

vlc
The VLC gui has an option to show video codec information (Tools > Codec Information).

exiftool
Exiftool extracts metadata from AVI, F4V, FLV, M2TS, M4V, MKV, MOV, MPEG, MQV, RM, VOB and WMV videos (as of version 8.22), as well as a large number of other file types.

mkvtoolnix
mkvtoolknix will only work on Matroska (mkv) files.