Video Metadata Viewer & Remover

About the Video Metadata Viewer & Remover

Open a video or audio file to see what it contains: the container and its brands, every track with its codec, profile and level, size, frame rate (and whether it is constant or variable), bit rate, rotation, HDR and colour information, sound channels and sample rate, chapters, and every tag — with the place each one is stored. Copy the report or save it as text or JSON.

Phones and cameras write where a video was filmed (GPS coordinates), on what (make, model, software version, serial numbers) and when into the file. The page lists these personal details first, and for MP4, MOV, M4A, 3GP, MKV and WebM files it removes them in one click without re-encoding: the tags are blanked where they are, so the picture, the sound, the chapters and the subtitles stay byte for byte the same. Then it reads the cleaned copy again and shows what is left.

Everything happens in your browser; the file is never uploaded.

Where personal details hide in a video file

• QuickTime metadata keys (iPhones and most modern apps): com.apple.quicktime.location.ISO6709 holds the coordinates, and make, model, software and creationdate the device and the moment of recording.
• User data atoms (Android phones and older cameras): ©xyz for the location, ©mak and ©mod for the make and model, ©day for the date; and the 3GPP loci box.
• Header dates: every MP4 and MOV stores a creation and change time in its movie, track and media headers.
• XMP packets written by editing apps: dates, GPS, camera and lens.
• Matroska and WebM: the segment’s DateUTC and tags such as DATE_RECORDED or LOCATION.
• Telemetry tracks (GoPro GPMF, camera motion data): positions recorded many times a second while filming.

How the remover works without re-encoding

Rewriting a video normally means copying all of it into a new file. Here nothing moves: each removed MP4 or MOV atom becomes a free box of the same size with its contents set to zero — the ISO base media file format lets a reader ignore such boxes — and header dates are set to zero, the value for “not set”. In Matroska and WebM files, removed elements become Void elements of the same size, as the Matroska specification (RFC 9559) suggests for edits, and the CRC-32 checksums of the parts that changed are computed again. Because every other byte stays where it was, the cleaned file is exactly as large as the original and plays the same.

The cleaned copy is then read again with the same rules, so you see whether anything in the categories you chose is left.

Reading the technical report

Format profile comes from the codec string (for example avc1.64001F is H.264 High profile, level 3.1). Frame rate mode is worked out from the frames’ own times: variable is normal for phone videos. Colour fields use the ITU-T H.273 code points that the file stores; PQ or HLG transfer means HDR, and mastering display and light-level values mark HDR10. Bit rates are averages over the whole track.

Limitations

• Removing is available for MP4, MOV, M4A, 3GP, MKV and WebM. MP3, WAV, FLAC, Ogg and MPEG-TS files are shown but not changed.
• Camera makers also store details in their own formats inside the file. Known camera boxes are blanked with the device details; anything else that is not a standard tag is listed in the report, and the page cannot be sure what it contains.
• A location burned into the picture (a dashcam or map overlay) or spoken in the sound cannot be removed by changing tags.
• Telemetry tracks are blanked only when you tick that option; their samples are then all zeros, so apps that show the route or speed will show nothing.
• For very large MKV and WebM files, bit rates and frame rates are measured on the first packets of each track (the report says so).
• Old formats such as AVI, WMV and FLV cannot be read in the browser.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.