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Q1View

Windows Viewer Comparator HEIF AVIF

Q1View overview

Q1View is a Windows toolkit for engineers who need to look at the actual pixels — raw frame buffers, codec output, decoded images, and the small visual differences that ordinary media players gloss over.

Download from Microsoft Store | Download latest release | User guide | Development guide

Who should use this?

Q1View is built for people whose work depends on what individual pixels look like and how two outputs differ — not for browsing a photo library.

  • Codec and video engineers validating encoder/decoder output against a reference, frame by frame.
  • Imaging engineers verifying camera pipelines, color-space conversions, and ISP tuning against raw buffer dumps.
  • Computer vision engineers comparing pre- and post-processing stages or inspecting model input/output frames.
  • QA and validation engineers confirming regressions, picking out off-by-one pixel shifts, and checking timing behavior on real material.
  • Researchers stepping through experiment outputs and capturing exact pixel values for reports.

Typical workflows

  • Inspect a raw YUV or RGB dump at any subsampling or bit depth, including odd-width sources, and read source-native channel values at the cursor.
  • Compare a reference image against a processed result with PSNR and SSIM overlaid and a pink pixel-diff highlight showing exactly where they disagree.
  • Step through an image sequence in a folder (frame_001.pngframe_100.png) or a video, with synchronized navigation across two to four sources.
  • Pull a clipboard screenshot in and check pixel coordinates, hex values, and small color drifts.
  • Drive two Viewer windows in sync to compare different decodes of the same source while panning and zooming as one.

Q1View is not intended to manage photo libraries or replace a consumer video player. It is focused on codec development, imaging validation, and quick frame-level investigation.

Applications

Viewer

Open an image, raw dump, sequence, or video; zoom down to pixels, inspect coordinates and values, step through frames, or link multiple Viewer windows.

Viewer displaying a video frame and timeline

Comparator

Open two to four sources side by side and see a visual difference together with objective similarity measurements.

Comparator showing PSNR for a reference image and encoded result

Download

Get Q1View from the Microsoft Store for automatic background updates and simple installation:

Get it from the Microsoft Store

Alternatively, get the latest Windows x64 build from the GitHub Releases page.

  • Installer: Q1ViewSetup-x64.exe
  • Portable package: Q1View-windows-x64.zip

The installer registers separate Start Menu entries for Q1View Viewer and Q1View Comparator.

Supported Inputs

  • BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WebP
  • HEIF, HEIC, HIF
  • AVIF / AV1 still images
  • Video files supported by the packaged OpenCV/FFmpeg runtime
  • Raw frame dumps and clipboard images

Documentation

Build

Q1View builds with Visual Studio 2019 or newer on Windows x64.

msbuild Viewer\Viewer.sln /m /restore /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64
msbuild Comparator\Comparator.sln /m /restore /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64

See the Development Guide for dependencies, packaging, and release assets.

Videos

Intro Viewer Comparator
Intro Viewer Comparator