MediaInfo 4+

its very functional, but I suppose I would want an option for it to remember the last view i was in and prefer it in the future so that I wouldnt have to select my preferred view each time. Also, the app icon is really strange and, with big sur, might be a good time to tweak

The option for it to remember the last view is available with the In-App Purchase (for supporting us a bit more, please :), the $1 fee is for the work on the engine itself, the next version will have more explanation in the description about the difference).We'll check the icon, if there are issues with Big Sur.

This is an awesome little app which does one thing: tells you exactly what is inside your media files. It does this extremely well.

It accepts every video file format that I'm aware of. The GUI is lean and straightforward. The output is detailed and efficiently presented. This app is far better than the built-in info functions in IINA or VLC, which I have used in the past. It’s really useful for managing and tidying a (video) media library---you can easily see which files are bloated with audio tracks, which are lower quality than you want, wrong language, etc. It feels like it should be built into the Mac operating system.

1. For side-by-side, I made a copy of the app in Applications and run two instances next to each other. This is at least 90% a good enough solution.
2. You can choose to open a whole folders of media files. After a minute or two for several TB of movies, the files are listed in the drop-down menu (nonalphabetically!!! CC: devs). You can easily go back and forth between them.

Close to perfect utility app

Thanks for your review and constructive criticism points.

For point 1, it is planned to have a comparison feature in the future.
For point 2, we order on operating system order, but we understand that alphabetical order is preferred, we'll fix that in a near future, with maybe a tooltip indicating that there is a drop-menu when there are more than 1 file analyzed.

I use this thing all the time. I get useful information out of it and people think I'm some kind of wizard. The new JSON output is great. (pretty-printed would be even better!)

But the feature I'd like the most is to be able to compare two (or more) media files and quickly identify just what's different.
UPDATE: It's arrived, and it's totally worth the modest subscription price. It instantaneously highlighted some unexpected differences in two similar media files that were behaving differently in Plex Media Player, things that I hadn't noticed when just going back and forth between the reports.

Minor nitpick: For the next update it would be nice to be able to close an individual file to remove it from the compare view. Also, reordering the columns. But seriously these are very minor. This app is unquestionably the best available wrapper for the awesome MediaInfo library.

Right, file comparison is there now :).
We'll add the possibility to remove 1 file from the comparison soon, reordering columns a bit later.

(and right, we need to polish a bit the JSON output as well as the XML one)