App: QCTools
Developer: MediaArea.net
Genres: Utilities, Photo & Video

QCTools (Quality Control Tools for Video Preservation) is a free and open source software tool that helps users analyze and understand their digitized video files through use of audiovisual analytics and filtering.

QCTools allows archivists, curators, preservationists and other moving image professionals to identify, filter, and assess all manner of video errors and anomalies. The tool is flexible, providing a variety of viewing options, as well the ability to create and export reports (gzip, or .gz files, formatted according to the ffprobe xml standard).

QCTools is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Knight Foundation, and is managed by the Bay Area Video Coalition.

MediaArea was involved in the initial development and provides binaries for all platforms.

Note: macOS 10.5-10.6 (64-bit) users, the Mac App Store version is not compatible with your operating system version due to technical limitations, you need to use the non Mac App Store version available at https://mediaarea.net/QCTools/Download/Mac_OS

Release notes:
=== Thanks to New York Public Library and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) for their support and contributions on this release ===
+ Refactor of method to generate statistics, panels, and thumbnails based on QtAVPlayer.
+ Updates to several playback filters to support RGB based pixel formats.
+ Additional Value Highlight playback filter to show specific values in addition to ranges.
+ Options to show Action Safe and Title Safe boundaries, thx @bbgdzxng1.
+ Improvements to several filters including Broadcast Illegal Focus, Bit Plane, and Waveform Target.
+ Replacement of the Chroma Delay playback filter with one based upon FFmpeg's chromashift.
+ Added support with Pixel Scope playback filter with smaller videos.
x Fix typo that broke part of the Extract Planes Equalized playback filter.
x Improvements on reading files that contain non-audiovisual streams.
+ Readnig panels from qctools.mkv report.
+ The Datascope, Waveform Target, Vectorscope Target, Zoom, and Pixel Scope filters now use a resizable/movable selection box to determine their area of focus.
+ Adding a blockdetect and blurdetect graph.
+ Switching to QtAVPlayer for graphing and playback, which also adds ffmpeg5 support to QCTools
x Fix issue with saving reports with comments (#738).
+ Added tests for valid files.
+ Performance improvements in player via QtAVPlayer.
x Fixes to audio statistics timestamps (#778).
x Fixes for loading/saving panels.
x Fixes to playback via the graph view.
x Fix critical bug where QCTools would use context from the thumbnail track of the QCTools report, if present, rather than the context of the source file.