Aagedal Media Player

A fast, private professional media inspection player for macOS. Compare masters, inspect picture and sound, verify metadata and timecode, and export review evidence without uploading your media.

Inspect a reference against an encode

1. Open the reference file as A, then use the toolbar's Add comparison file control to load its delivery encode as B. B starts silent.
2. Check the alignment status and overlapping interval. Source timecode aligns embedded timecodes; Relative start aligns file starts when either timecode is missing. Use manual alignment for an intentional offset in seconds or A frames.
3. Play, pause, scrub, or frame-step with the shared transport. Choose Vertical Wipe from Compare view and drag the divider across fine detail, or press B to switch between A and B. Display Difference highlights visible differences; it is not an objective quality score.
4. Press Command-Shift-M, enable Show loupe, and inspect a detail at 2×, 4×, or 8×. Pin picture position keeps that location while you operate playback. The paired previews use the same normalized picture coordinate; their captures are independent and not frame-locked. A guarded native-pixel option appears only when every visible source uses AVFoundation and its captured dimensions match the expected oriented coded raster.
5. Pause at a useful comparison point and choose File > Export Comparison Still (Command-S). The annotated PNG places A and B side by side with filenames, timecodes, alignment, inspection view, and technical details. It uses that fixed layout regardless of the live wipe, overlay, or difference selection.

Loupe and still imagery are display-space previews; HDR appearance can differ from the live display. For a repeatable local example, generate the reference and encode pair in the demo guide.

Ordinary windows can also share transport commands; see window synchronization for its scope and the separate one-time timecode alignment command.

Inspect live source audio

Choose Live Audio Meter from the View menu, press Command-Shift-L, or use the waveform-meter toolbar button. The per-player panel can meter source A or B independently of the audible comparison source. Select any audio track, or assign mono tracks to stereo or 5.1 speakers, without changing audible playback. Grouped live tracks require the same supported sample rate. The panel shows sample peak, true peak, Momentary, Short-term and integrated LUFS readings with EBU, ATSC or custom reference guides. A graph shows the latest 60 seconds of Momentary and Short-term loudness. Integrated loudness uses absolute and relative gating with a bounded 0.01-LU histogram and covers the current measurement segment. Reset Meters clears all readings, maxima and graph history at the current playback position; seeking or changing the source also begins a new segment. Brief decoder lag automatically starts a fresh segment at the current playback position, with at most three recovery attempts per minute. These guides do not by themselves establish programme compliance; live-path compressed-source and release-floor acceptance remain in progress.

Offline LUFS analysis in the inspector also graphs Momentary and Short-term loudness across the whole analyzed file or In–Out range, for individual tracks and grouped mono programmes. Long analyses use a bounded, downsampled graph.

Roadmap

See PRODUCT_ROADMAP.md for the release sequence from the 1.6.1 reliability foundation through Compare Mode, Audio QC, and review/report workflows.

Local verification

Media integration tests use tiny, locally generated clips so large binary fixtures are never committed:

scripts/generate-test-fixtures.sh
xcodebuild test -project "Aagedal Media Player.xcodeproj" -scheme "Aagedal Media Player" -destination "platform=macOS"

The generator requires a full ffmpeg installation with libx264/libx265. Set FFMPEG=/path/to/ffmpeg to select one explicitly. If fixtures are absent, the generated-media tests are skipped; all pure unit tests continue to run. External-reference and disk-full integration checks require their separate harnesses.

Verify review-save recovery on a real full filesystem with an isolated 32 MiB HFS+ or 128 MiB APFS disk image:

scripts/test-compare-review-disk-full.sh -configuration Release
# Optional bounded APFS variant:
AAGEDAL_DISK_FULL_FILESYSTEM=APFS scripts/test-compare-review-disk-full.sh -configuration Release

The harness creates and validates its own temporary volume, checks production atomic writes and retry, then detaches and removes the image. It retains the test results and volume evidence in the printed artifact directory. The ordinary test suite skips this opt-in check. See review persistence for the recovery guarantees and remaining native acceptance.

Scope rendering has an optimized profiling matrix covering every available scope resolution and the full 5–30 fps update-rate range:

scripts/profile-scopes.sh

The report includes luma and RGBY parade render time, sustainable update rate, and estimated renderer load for every supported update-rate setting. Timings are machine-dependent, so compare changes on the same hardware and profile on the oldest Mac supported for release when changing scope capture or rendering.

Compare Mode has a separate opt-in production-resolution profile:

scripts/profile-compare-mode.sh | tee compare-mode-profile.txt

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗