Mediq

Video professionals preparing masters for broadcast and streaming delivery rely on tools like QCTools and dedicated loudness meters to verify EBU R128 compliance, codec parameters, and signal legality. These tools are slow to launch, GUI-heavy, and poorly suited to the iterative "encode, check, re-encode" loop that defines modern delivery workflows. Engineers working over SSH or on headless rendering machines often have no good option at all. I needed to build a tool that surfaces the same technical depth in seconds, runs anywhere a terminal does, and stays out of the way of a keyboard-driven workflow.

developed Mediq, a terminal-based media quality control application that streamlines compliance verification and technical analysis for video professionals working with broadcast and streaming deliverables. I built the core functionality as a fast, keyboard-driven TUI, implementing real-time loudness measurement against EBU R128 standards, a responsive multi-pane dashboard surfacing codec metadata, bitrate histograms, and luma distribution analysis, and frame-accurate transport controls for inspecting problem regions. Throughout the development process, I focused on creating a dense, information-rich interface that prioritizes speed and keyboard efficiency while ensuring accurate compliance reporting and robust handling of modern codecs like AV1.

started by working backwards from the delivery checklist — every parameter a QC engineer actually inspects before signing off a master, and the exact tolerances each broadcaster expects. That list became the data model. I built the analysis pipeline on top of FFmpeg's libavformat, libavcodec, and the ebur128 filter, sampling loudness, bitrate, and luma in parallel so the dashboard could update without blocking playback. The rendering layer is a custom TUI with a fixed-width grid that adapts to terminal size, using ANSI 256-color sparklines and braille-character histograms to keep the interface dense but readable. Every interaction was designed around single-keystroke access — Space to play, brackets to jump between bitrate spikes, comma and period for frame-stepping — so the tool stays in the same muscle-memory category as vim or mpv. I tested against a corpus of real-world deliverables (festival masters, streaming source files, broadcast-spec ProRes) to make sure edge cases like variable frame rate, embedded HDR metadata, and unusual channel layouts were handled correctly rather than silently misreported.

Mediq collapsed what used to be a multi-tool workflow — QCTools for signal analysis, a separate loudness meter, ffprobe in another terminal — into a single TUI that opens in under a second and runs anywhere a shell does, including over SSH on headless render machines. The development process pushed me deep into the FFmpeg library internals, the EBU R128 specification, and the constraints of building dense, information-rich interfaces inside the terminal's character grid. It also reinforced something I came in believing: that the right tool for a power user is rarely the prettiest one, but the one that disappears into muscle memory.