Invisor For Mac Review

Written by John Thompson on January 4, 2012 · Filed under Review, Software 

I really dislike optical media. This partly stems from the fact that I am incredibly clumsy and tend to have a tech-related accident at least three times a week, and it also stems from the amount of space that optical media takes in cupboards and on shelves and underneath televisions. You get the idea.

So for any one of the reasons listed above, I do my best to keep optical media at a minimum. To ensure I don’t compromise on quality, a big part of this effort involves remuxing (ripping, without compression) my blu-ray discs with MakeMKV whilst keeping the original video and audio tracks uncompressed and at the best quality possible.

Whether you’ve ripped the disc yourself like I do, or obtained a copy using less legal means, people who care about the quality of their content may want to check figures such as the bit rate of the video track. Normally, it might be quite awkward to find this information, but thanks to a little Mac application called Invisor, the whole process is incredibly simple.

How simple? As simple as drag and drop. Really! Invisor is a very small application that you can buy from the Mac App Store for £1.99 – there is a free version also available on the store if you want to try before you buy – and allows you to drop any video file on to it and see everything you could possibly wish to see about it.

When you open Invisor, the main window is somewhat of a blank canvas until you feed it with a file. When you drop a video file on it, you can choose between the “General” and “Extended” tabs. When viewing information under ‘General’, you can see an overview of the main points of the file at the top of the window, such as file format, total size, duration and overall bit rate. Underneath the overview, you can see some more detailed information about the video, audio and subtitle tracks that are in the file.

If you select the “Extended” tab, you will be treated to a plethora of information about the file in question. Here, you can view the date that the file was encoded, what application and libraries were used to encode it, and detailed information about the video and audio tracks that you won’t find on the other tab. If you’re really serious about video, this is where you want to be.

Although a lot of the information in the ‘Extended’ tab is beyond me, it would come in useful for anyone working professionally in video or audio if they wanted to quickly check something in a file that they had created. If you really wanted to, you could even find out what the Chroma subsampling was in your video track.

For such a cheap application, Invisor delivers a whole host of useful information to the user. At £1.99 in the App Store, it’s well worth the cost even if you only intend to use it on the odd occasion. Since buying it, I’ve already used it quite a bit myself.