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SwiftMediaInfo v2.0
SwiftMediaInfo v2.0
Rebuilt from the engine up — settings, checksums, plain-language explanations, and an accessibility pass that reaches every control
The largest release since the app began. Almost every file was rewritten, and the parts you can see are the smaller half of it.
Website · What's in it · Field reference · FAQ · Full changelog
⭐ Highlights
| 🎛 A real settings window | Six panes. Everything the app used to decide for you is now yours to set |
| 🔒 SHA-256 checksums | Computed on request, cached, and carried into exports |
| 📖 Around 70 fields explained | Plain language, inline, for the ones nobody remembers |
| 🎨 A background you own | Three modes, colours you pick, four ready-made palettes |
| ♿ Full VoiceOver support | Built into the shared components rather than bolted on |
| 🧱 A custom design system | Spacing, motion and colour defined once, on macOS 26's Liquid Glass |
🌐 The app has a website now
undisclosed0369.app/swiftmediainfo
Everything that used to live in a README now has room to breathe: what the app does, how it compares to MediaArea's own Mac app including the things theirs does better, what the first-launch warning actually means, what leaves your machine and when, and a changelog that updates itself from these releases.
The app links to it too — ⌘/ opens it, and so does the Help menu.
It sits on undisclosed0369.app, which is where anything else I put out will live.
📚 Field reference
The complete field reference →
Every field the app can explain, written out in one document — what it means, why it is there, and what a normal value looks like. The app shows these inline as you read a report; this is the same material in one place, for when you would rather have it all at once or want to read ahead.
🆕 New
🎛 The settings window
The app had no settings window before. It has six panes now.
- General, Appearance, Analysis, MediaInfo, Privacy and Advanced
- Interface scaling — zooms the whole settings layout, not just the text in it
- Restore Defaults, returning every preference at once
- Copy environment summary for bug reports: version, macOS, architecture, MediaInfo path and version, and your current settings
- MediaInfo installation moved here from the bottom bar, with four honest states — checking, missing, installing, failed — and a Retry that genuinely retries
- Re-detect, for straight after installing or upgrading MediaInfo
🔒 Verification
- SHA-256 checksums for any open file, included in exported reports — so an archive copy can be checked against the original years later
- Real progress while hashing, and cancelling stops the work immediately rather than only hiding it
- Results are cached, so the same file is never hashed twice
- Computed on request rather than automatically, because hashing means reading every byte of the file
📖 Reading
- Plain-language explanations for around 70 fields, inline — for anyone who has wondered what a chroma subsampling ratio actually is. The whole set is also written out as a field reference
- Copy any single value, or a field and its value together, from a hover affordance or the context menu
🎨 The background
1.6 had an animated background you could toggle. It is now something you own.
- Three modes — Off, Static and Animated
- Custom colours — three shades, with colour wells and hex fields
- Four palettes — Signature, Tide, Meadow and Ember
- A Liquid Glass toggle, for anyone who would rather have solid surfaces and the battery life that comes with them
📂 Files
- Five file actions from one menu: reveal in Finder, copy path, open in the default app, rename, and move to Trash
🛡 Privacy
- Review before sharing. A report is shown in full before it is uploaded, with the option to strip file paths first — a path often carries a username, and sometimes a good deal more
🔗 Links out
- Website links in the About window, the Help menu, and at
⌘/— which now opens the website rather than GitHub - Frequently Asked Questions in the Help menu, going straight to the page that answers the common ones
- Double-clicking the app icon in Settings opens the website
- A Donate button in the About and Settings windows, for anyone who wants to say thanks. Everything is free and stays free — nothing is locked, and nothing changes in the app either way
⚡ Improved
🛠 Finder integration
The extension existed. It now works properly.
- Works in every folder, not only some
- Select two files and compare them directly from the Finder menu
⚖️ Comparison
- Differences are computed once and symmetrically, so the two sides can never disagree about what changed
- A summary panel lists every difference, and clicking one jumps straight to that field
- Swap the two sides from a control on the divider
- Hold ⌥ while dragging a second file onto an open one to compare without leaving the window
💬 The About and Shortcuts windows
Both existed. Both were rebuilt.
- Redesigned on Liquid Glass to match the rest of the app
- The shortcuts reference gains new entries and notes where a shortcut applies only to a single open file
- Escape closes both, and
⌘Mno longer minimises the About window — which had no business being minimisable
🚀 Performance
- The animated background is rendered at quarter resolution and scaled up. It is a soft gradient; nothing is lost, and it costs a fraction as much to draw
- It now also pauses in Low Power Mode, on top of the scroll, occlusion and background pausing from 1.6
- Row hover is instant. Sweeping the pointer down a list used to start dozens of overlapping animations at once
- Analysis results are cached, so reopening a file is immediate
- A full pass over the codebase: dead code removed, duplicated logic consolidated, and a number of smaller efficiency improvements throughout
🧩 Reliability
- The engine was rewritten with typed errors and safe cancellation. One format failing no longer takes the others down with it
- Every interface state is named rather than inferred from whether a string happened to be empty
- The default analysis timeout is 60 seconds — long enough for any real file, short enough that a hang does not feel like a freeze
♿ Accessibility
A full pass, made at the shared components so it applies everywhere rather than being added screen by screen.
- VoiceOver throughout, with meaningful labels, hints and states on every control
- Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency honoured at the design-token level
- Complete keyboard control
⌨️ Changed
These alter habits, so they are listed plainly rather than buried.
| Before | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| ⌘W | Closed the window | Closes the open file — and closes the window when nothing is open. ⌥⌘W closes the window |
| ⌘B | Toggled the animated background | Cycles — Off → Static → Animated |
| ⌘/ | Opened the GitHub page | Opens the website |
| ⌘I | — | About SwiftMediaInfo |
| Checksums | — | Computed when you ask, not automatically |
| Analysis timeout | — | 60 seconds |
🐞 Fixed
⌘↩in Compare Mode opened File A instead of offering a choice between File A and File B- The Finder extension did not work in every folder
⌘Mminimised the About window instead of doing nothing- Several "Publishing changes from within view updates" warnings, from settings written during a view's own render pass
- Escape now closes the About and Shortcuts windows
🔧 Under the hood
Not user-facing, but it is why the rest of this list was possible.
- A design-token system — spacing, radii, elevation, motion and colour, defined once and used everywhere
- Accessibility helpers built into the shared components, so a new control inherits correct behaviour instead of needing it added
- Export logic moved to its own file;
MediaStoreshrank by about 750 lines - Every external address lives in one place, so a link can no longer rot in three files at once
- Dead code removed, including several helpers nothing called any more
⬆️ Upgrading from 1.6
Two one-time things, both expected:
- Your settings return to defaults. The app's internal identifier changed in this release, so macOS looks for preferences under a new name and finds none. Nothing is lost from your files — the old preferences are simply ignored. Set your appearance and background once more and it will stick.
- The Finder extension may need re-enabling. For the same reason, macOS treats it as new. The app re-enables it on launch, but if the right-click menu is missing, look in System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions → Finder Extensions.
🙏 Built on MediaInfo
Every number this app shows you was read by MediaInfo, a separate project by MediaArea, maintained for two decades. They wrote the hard part. This is the window onto it.
If you need Windows, Linux, a language other than English, or a signed application, their Mac app is the better choice and you should use it.
Found a bug, or have an idea? Open an issue or use the feedback form. Ideas are welcome; the contributing guide explains what helps most.