Audiovisual debugger

I have never though about FFplay in that way but it had struck me today that waveform visual display is one of the best ways to debug it.
Why?


FFplay

One of C.P.E. Bach’s Wurttemberg sonatas (a small excerpt, really)

Because it gives you those advantages:

  1. Noise hurts your eyes less than ears
  2. Some inaudible artifacts (like DC bias) are easily spottable
  3. Clipping and volume change is easily spottable too
  4. Stereo differences are easy to find
  5. It may give you some aesthetic pleasure 😉

I must also add that most audio player have visualizers but they lack simplicity and usability of this 640×480 clean waveform rendering.

One Response to “Audiovisual debugger”

  1. I agree completely. I wanted a clean, no-frills oscilloscope visualizer for xine so I wrote one. I never imagined that it would be useful as a debugging tool. But there were a few types of files that had given me trouble. When I watched them using the o-scope, the problem because too obvious– I was interpreting signed PCM data as unsigned! That makes for an interesting graph.