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](http://codecs.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/1.png)
One of C.P.E. Bach’s Wurttemberg sonatas (a small excerpt, really)
Because it gives you those advantages:
- Noise hurts your eyes less than ears
- Some inaudible artifacts (like DC bias) are easily spottable
- Clipping and volume change is easily spottable too
- Stereo differences are easy to find
- …
- 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.
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.