Video Inventory

Anyone who has inherited a hard drive of footage knows the ritual: double-click a file, wait for the player, squint at the resolution, write it down, repeat forty times. Desktop tools like exiftool or VideoCheck automate this, but they're command-line utilities — powerful, and completely inaccessible to the videographer, archivist or producer who just needs a spreadsheet of what's on the drive. This tool fills that gap with the lightest possible approach: the browser asks each file only for its header metadata, the same few kilobytes a player reads before pressing play, and builds the inventory from that.

Header-only reading is why it's fast — a hundred files scan in seconds — and why it's honest about its limits. Duration, dimensions and file size live in the header; frame rate and codec details do not, at least not in any form the browser's video element exposes. A tool that guessed "30 fps" for every MP4 would be inventing data, so those columns say n/a. For the questions an inventory actually answers — how much footage do I have, what's the longest clip, which files are 4K, what's eating my disk — header data is everything you need.

The quality column deserves a word of explanation: it maps the vertical resolution to familiar labels (2160p → 4K, 1080p → Full HD, and so on) so a non-technical client can read the CSV without a decoder ring. And because nothing is decoded, files your browser can't even play still report their size and name — only the duration and resolution columns fall back to n/a for those. Run a batch, export the CSV, and you have an archive audit that used to take an afternoon.