BDInfo is a free Mac and Windows utility that reads the raw technical metadata embedded inside Blu-ray disc structures, delivering a precise report of every video, audio, and subtitle track without touching your player or transcoder.
What is BDInfo?
BDInfo is an open-source Blu-ray disc analyser that scans a disc image or a physical drive's BDMV folder and extracts the exact codec parameters, bitrate measurements, and stream composition of every title on the disc. Think of it as the forensic counterpart to MediaInfo — but purpose-built for the layered, playlist-driven structure of Blu-ray rather than for standalone video files.
I keep BDInfo permanently pinned to my dock whenever I'm prepping a disc remux. Before I commit to a multi-hour encode or a lossless archive rip, I'll drop a BDMV folder on BDInfo and have every track accounted for in under a minute. That kind of certainty is worth its weight in gold when you're working with 50 GB source material.
What does BDInfo do best?
BDInfo excels at demystifying the playlist nightmare that is commercial Blu-ray authoring. Most discs contain dozens of MPLS playlists, many of them decoys or seamless-branching duplicates, and BDInfo tells you immediately which one carries the full feature at the highest average bitrate.
- Bitrate graphs per stream — peak and average video bitrate plotted over the full runtime, invaluable for deciding whether a remux needs recompression.
- Complete audio inventory — codec (TrueHD, DTS-HD MA, Atmos, DTS:X, LPCM), channel configuration, sample rate, and language for every stream in the playlist.
- Subtitle and chapter mapping — all PGS, TextST, and HDMV streams listed with their language tags.
- Quick Summary report — a shareable plain-text block that sites like Blu-ray.com and forum release threads expect when you post disc specs.
I've also found BDInfo indispensable when verifying rips made with MakeMKV. If the output MKV is missing an audio track I expected, BDInfo immediately shows me whether it was present on the disc in the first place — no more blaming the mux when the source was the problem.
Is BDInfo free?
Yes — BDInfo is completely free to download and use. It is an open-source project and has been freely available for many years with no subscription, no nag screen, and no feature paywall. The project is hosted on VideoHelp and mirrors exist across the disc-enthusiast community, so finding a current build is straightforward.
Who should use BDInfo?
BDInfo is squarely aimed at power users who work with Blu-ray content at a technical level. If you are ripping, remuxing, or encoding discs with tools like MakeMKV, Handbrake, or FFmpeg, BDInfo is the first thing you should run against a source. Home-theatre hobbyists cataloguing disc collections, AV forum contributors posting technical specs, and video engineers doing quality-control on authored discs all reach for it regularly.
Casual Plex users who just want to play their rips will likely never need it. But the moment you want to understand why a particular disc sounds different or why one playlist streams at a suspiciously low bitrate, there is genuinely no substitute.
How does BDInfo compare to MediaInfo?
MediaInfo is the go-to tool for analysing individual media files — MKVs, MP4s, AVI containers. BDInfo is not a competitor; it operates one layer upstream, reading the raw BDMV directory structure before any demuxing has occurred. Once you've made your MKV with MakeMKV, MediaInfo takes over and BDInfo's job is done. Using MediaInfo on a BDMV folder will give you partial, sometimes misleading results because it doesn't understand Blu-ray playlist logic. The two tools are complementary, not interchangeable.
Alternatives in the Blu-ray analysis space include DGDemux, which goes further by actually demuxing streams, and eac3to, which is a command-line powerhouse for extraction but gives much less readable diagnostics than BDInfo's playlist view. For pure disc inspection, nothing matches BDInfo's readability.
What are BDInfo's limitations?
BDInfo is a read-only scanner — it cannot rip, decode, or play anything. It also requires the full BDMV folder structure to be accessible, so encrypted discs you haven't backed up with MakeMKV or AnyDVD first are off-limits. The UI, while functional, is decidedly utilitarian; don't expect a polished macOS-native experience. On Apple Silicon Macs it runs via Rosetta or a Mono runtime depending on the build you grab, which occasionally introduces minor launch friction. The project updates infrequently, though Blu-ray's specification has been stable for years, so this rarely matters in practice.
