mcraw-tui

Cross-platform TUI for browsing, inspecting, and exporting MotionCam (.mcraw) files.

Reads MCRAW and MOTION format files, decodes raw Bayer data through a full color pipeline, and exports to professional video formats or CinemaDNG. All in the terminal.

Features

• In-browser file management: file browser with directory navigation, favourites, hidden file toggle
• Selective import: import individual, selected, or all .mcraw files from a directory
• Full color pipeline: bilinear demosaic (RCD GPU with CPU fallback), white balance, color matrix, transfer function encoding
• Export to: ProRes, DNxHR, H.264, HEVC, AV1, VP9, CinemaDNG
• Hardware encoder detection: NVENC, AMF, QSV, VideoToolbox auto-selected when available
• Export presets: save/load named preset configurations
• Batch queue: add multiple files, render sequentially, track per-file progress

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.74+ (edition 2021)
• FFmpeg 5.0+ on PATH — required at runtime for video encoding
• motioncam-decoder-rust — sibling directory checked out alongside this repo

Installing FFmpeg

# macOS

brew install ffmpeg


# Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt install ffmpeg


# Fedora

sudo dnf install ffmpeg


# Windows (Scoop)

scoop install ffmpeg


# Windows (Winget)

winget install ffmpeg

Build from source

# Clone both repos

git clone https://github.com/Yoganshbhatt/mcraw-tui.git

git clone https://github.com/Yoganshbhatt/motioncam-decoder-rust.git


# Build

cd mcraw-tui

cargo build --release


# The binary is at target/release/mcraw-tui (or mcraw-tui.exe on Windows)

The binary is self-contained — motioncam-decoder-rust is statically linked. Only FFmpeg is needed at runtime.

Platform notes

CLI Usage

mcraw-tui [OPTIONS] [COMMAND]

Global options

Subcommands

Export format flags

TUI Usage

Panel layout

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Header: file path, metadata, export status           │
├──────────────┬──────────────────────┬────────────────┤
│  Media Pool  │  Render Queue        │ Export Settings│
│  (imported   │  (pending/           │  (color space, │
│   .mcraw     │   rendering/         │   transfer fn, │
│   files)     │   completed/failed)  │   codec, rate) │
├──────────────┴──────────────────────┴────────────────┤
│ Browser overlay (toggle with `b`)                    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Workflow

1. Open with mcraw-tui -f file.mcraw — browser opens automatically if no file specified
2. Browse files with the file browser — navigate directories, mark favourites, toggle hidden files
3. Import individual files with I or load all .mcraw in current folder with L
4. Configure export settings — cycle through codec, color space, transfer function, profile, rate control
5. Queue items with a (selected) or A (all imported)
6. Render with v (selected) or R (all queued)
7. Monitor progress in the queue panel — cancel with X

Keybindings

Navigation

File management

Browser

Export settings (when focused)

Actions

General

Export formats

The TUI supports more codecs than the CLI. Full matrix:

Hardware encoders (NVENC, AMF, QSV, VideoToolbox) are detected at startup and preferred over software encoders when available.

Export presets

Save and load named preset configurations. Presets are stored in the platform config directory as presets.json.

• Press p (export settings focused) to name and save the current configuration
• Press P to open the preset picker
• Delete removes a saved preset

Color science

Pipeline order

Raw Bayer → Demosaic (bilinear / RCD GPU) → White balance → Color matrix (CCM) → Transfer function → RGB encoding

Logging

Logs are written to the platform-specific data directory:

Logs rotate daily and are cleaned after 7 days. Set MCRAW_TUI_LOG=<level> to control verbosity.

Architecture

Three-thread pipeline using bounded crossbeam channels:

┌──────────┐    ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────┐
│  Loader  │───→│  Processor   │───→│  Writer  │
│ (decoder)│    │ (demosaic →  │    │ (ffmpeg  │
│          │    │  WB → CCM →  │    │  stdin)  │
│          │    │  OETF)       │    │          │
└──────────┘    └──────┬───────┘    └──────────┘
                       │ optional
                       ↓
                  ┌──────────┐
                  │  GPU     │
                  │ (wgpu)   │
                  └──────────┘

The processor thread can optionally dispatch RCD demosaic to a GPU compute pipeline (wgpu + WGSL) with graceful CPU fallback.

Credits

This project builds on several open-source colour science projects. Full details in CREDITS.md.

Key dependencies:

• colour-science/colour (BSD-3-Clause) — transfer function implementations and color space conversions
• motioncam-decoder-rust (Apache-2.0) — MotionCam RAW file decoding

License

Apache-2.0