🎥 The Hero Section

See Beneath the Frame with Video-Peek.

The native, studio-grade video specification analyzer and side-by-side A-B diff comparator engineered exclusively for macOS.

📖 The Product Story

Why we built Video-Peek

In digital cinema, broadcast mastering, color grading, and streaming delivery, video workflows are more complex than ever:

• Color space confusion: Did your render preserve wide-gamut ITU-R BT.2020 HDR10, or was it quietly clamped to standard Rec.709 SDR?
• Chroma subsampling drops: Did your mastering transcode maintain 10-bit 4:2:2 master fidelity, or was it degraded to 8-bit 4:2:0?
• Frame rate pull-downs & drift: Did an automated web pipeline drop 2 frames or introduce a 23.976 $\rightarrow$ 29.97 fps pulldown stutter?
• Bloated tooling: Opening DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro just to check a video’s transfer function (EOTF) or FourCC codec takes 30 seconds. QuickTime Player’s basic inspector hides crucial mastering data, and terminal tools like ffprobe disrupt your creative flow.

We asked a simple question: What if you had a blazing-fast, visually pristine Mac app that reveals the complete DNA of any video file in under 200 milliseconds?

Video-Peek was created at Tara Design Studio to answer that need. Built from the ground up in 100% native Swift and SwiftUI, Video-Peek taps directly into Apple’s low-level CoreMedia, AVFoundation, VideoToolbox, and CryptoKit frameworks. No web runtimes. No GPU memory exhaustion. Just pure, instant video intelligence.

⚡ Key Features

🎞️ Deep Visual Bitstream Demuxing Inspect true FourCC codec tags (apch, hvc1, avc1, av01), native dimensions, aspect ratios, clean aperture, scan types, and frame counts without decoding heavy video frames into VRAM.	⚖️ Side-by-Side A-B Video Comparator Compare two video files simultaneously. Video-Peek aligns property keys and instantly highlights resolution scaling, color gamut drops, chroma downgrades, and missing audio tracks.
⏱️ Frame-Accurate Drift & Timecode Analytics Detect exact frame drops (+2 frames) and millisecond duration discrepancies (down to 0.1ms) between mastering masters and compressed web transcode generations.	🎨 Color Primaries, HDR & EOTF Profiling Instantly extract Color Primaries (BT.709, BT.2020, DCI-P3), Transfer Characteristics (SDR, SMPTE ST 2084 / PQ HDR10, ARIB STD-B67 / HLG, Apple Log), and YCbCr matrix coefficients.
🛡️ Hardware-Accelerated SHA-256 Stream massive 100+ GB ProRes or camera raw masters in 64 KB binary chunks through Apple Silicon’s hardware cryptographic engine without memory bloat.	🔤 Scoped Report Font Zoom Adjust the reporting table’s typography independently (A- / A+ / ↺ Reset). Scale the specification tree without breaking your window layout or toolbar chrome.

🎯 Universal Container & Codec Support

Video-Peek parses uncompressed cinema masters, broadcast containers, and web streams:

Category	Supported Containers & Codecs
Cinema & Post-Production	Apple ProRes Family (ProRes 422 HQ, 422, LT, Proxy, 4444, 4444 XQ in .mov), Apple ProRes RAW
Modern Web & Streaming	HEVC / H.265 (Main 10, HDR10, Dolby Vision), H.264 / AVC (High, Main, Baseline), AV1 (.mp4, .mkv, .webm)
Broadcast & Archival	Broadcast MXF (.mxf), MPEG Transport Stream (.ts, .mts, .m2ts), Audio Video Interleave (.avi), Matroska (.mkv)
Embedded Audio Streams	Linear PCM (24/32-bit Multi-Channel), AAC-LC, Dolby Digital (AC-3), Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3), ALAC, FLAC
Subtitles & Timecodes	SMPTE Timecode Tracks, CEA-608 / CEA-708 Closed Captions, TX3G, WebVTT

🏆 Why Video-Peek is Different

Most diagnostic utilities are bloated ports. Video-Peek is built exclusively for macOS:

Capability / Metric	Video-Peek	MediaInfo (GUI)	ffprobe (CLI)
Native Architecture	✅ 100% Swift / CoreMedia	⚠️ WxWidgets Port	⚠️ C Utility
Launch Time	⚡ < 10 ms (Instant)	🐢 800+ ms	⚡ Fast
Memory Footprint	🪶 ~ 24 MB (No VRAM Buffer)	🐘 120 MB	🪶 ~ 20 MB
Visual A-B Diff Mode	✅ Built-in Split-Table	❌ None	❌ Manual diff
Frame Drift Analytics	✅ Exact (ΔFrames & Δt)	❌ None	❌ Manual math
120Hz ProMotion UI	✅ Liquid Smooth	❌ Frame drops	❌ Terminal only
Hardware SHA-256	✅ CryptoKit NEON Engine	❌ Not included	⚠️ Separate tool

✨ User Experience Highlights

1. Dual-Drop Compare Mode

Select two video files in Finder (like your 4K ProRes master and your 1080p H.265 YouTube render) and drag them together onto Video-Peek. The window instantly transitions into a two-column comparative diff table, highlighting mismatches in bold amber and identical parameters in calm green.

2. Zero VRAM Exhaustion on Massive Master Files

Thanks to non-blocking stream demuxing, dropping a 120 GB ProRes 4444 XQ feature film master takes the exact same fraction of a second as opening a 15 MB MP4 screen recording.

3. Native Mac Ergonomics

• Full support for macOS Dark and Light modes.
• Universal keyboard shortcuts (⌘O to open, ⌘E to export, ⌘C to copy, ⌘+ to scale text, ⇧⌘L to view logs).
• Multi-column search bar that filters video keys, codecs, and color properties instantly as you type.

🚀 Elevate Your Video Mastering & Workflow

Stop guessing what is inside your video containers. Verify color gamuts, confirm chroma subsampling, and validate frame-rate parity with precision.

💬 Help & Support

Frequently Asked Questions

💡 Click any question below to expand the answer.

Does Video-Peek alter or re-encode my video files? + View Answer ▾

No. Video-Peek operates strictly in read-only mode. It inspects container headers and stream format descriptions without modifying or re-encoding a single frame of your footage.

Where are diagnostic logs stored? + View Answer ▾

Video-Peek maintains rolling daily logs formatted as video-peek-YYYY-MM-DD.log. You can reveal your log folder directly in Finder anytime by pressing ⇧ + ⌘ + L (or via Help → Show Logs in Finder).

Is Video-Peek private? + View Answer ▾

Yes. Video-Peek is 100% secure. It contains zero analytics, no telemetry, no tracking, and never makes unauthorized network connections.

Does Video-Peek detect HDR color metadata (HDR10, Dolby Vision, HLG) and Variable Frame Rates (VFR)? + View Answer ▾

Yes. Video-Peek directly extracts track stream headers to verify color primaries (Rec. 709 vs. Rec. 2020), transfer characteristics (PQ, HLG, Linear), Dolby Vision configuration profiles/levels, and mastering display luminance metadata. It also identifies whether a file uses a Constant Frame Rate (CFR) or Variable Frame Rate (VFR) stream to prevent audio-sync drift in video editing NLEs.

How do I report a bug or request a new container format? + View Answer ▾

You can open an issue or start a discussion on our official Issue Tracker.

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© 2026 Santak Das, Tara Design Studio. All rights reserved.