Accessing audio/video metadata with .NET

Question

What is the best way to get and set the meta data for mp3, mp4, avi files etc. with .NET?

Answer 1

I use MediaInfo with my C# apps, gives you a lot of information about media files.

Answer 2

These are the example class files for different languages found in the MediaInfo.dll zip

• MediaInfoDLL.cs
• MediaInfoDLL.def
• MediaInfoDLL.h
• MediaInfoDLL.java
• MediaInfoDLL.jsl
• MediaInfoDLL.pas
• MediaInfoDLL.py
• MediaInfoDLL.vb
• MediaInfoDLL_Static.h

You do have to use interop and I don't know if you can edit tags, I've never needed to do that but it's pretty much a swiss army knife at least for getting media information from files.

Link to downloads page (sourceforge)

MediaInfo_0.7.7.4_DLL_Win32.zip

Answer 3

I've recently used Tag Lib Sharp to write some C# apps for cleaning up and maintaining my music library. I found the library very easy to use and although i've only used it for MP3's, it appears to support a range of other music/video formats.

Answer 4

You can use free UltraID3Lib .NET library to read/write MP3 metadata.

Answer 5

I've been looking at the NTag project as well, which handles MP3/WMA/OGG. I don't know of a single library that handles audio and video files, so you might have to use a few.

Answer 6

Looks like MediaInfo is read-only at this point, by the way: http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=4241318&abmode=1

Very cool project, though. It's fun finding out about all this cool stuff here on SO.

Answer 7

I used COM interop to access DirectShow's Media Detector functionality.

This does work pretty well, but it's a right pain in the backside. You need to know lots about COM, win32 interop, and so on.

You can also use DirectShowNet which should handle most of that for you, I just didn't want to lug that whole thing around when I was only interested in the MediaDetector part