A new app hit Flathub this week that makes it incredibly easy to compare two videos with each other on Linux desktops like Ubuntu.
The app is called Identity and it’s built in GTK (which is always great to see) and is, in my opinion, a must-have for content makers and video editors. Using GStreamer as its media-handling backend, Identity lets you compare the quality (or play spot the differences) between multiple videos or images.
Unlike playing two videos side by side (which is how I normally compare them) Identity plays both clips at the same time, in sync, in the same window, and controlled by the same seek bar. You switch between them using on-screen tabs or keyboard shortcuts (e.g., 1 to show video one, 2 to show video two, and so on).
How is this useful? Well, you may be working on a video with lots of text in it. Although you’ll upload in HD you may want to double check that on-screen text is legible at ‘potato cam’ resolutions too.
And if you need to get really forensic — say comparing the flow of a transition between two similar edits — you can move through videos frame by fame.
In summary, Identity is a useful app that makes it easy to compare multiple versions of the same video with each other to spot differences, flaws, artefacts, or imperfections between different versions of the same video or image file.
Identity is free open source software available to install on Linux distros through Flathub, a Flatpak App Store: