mcdonald is a frame-by-frame analysis toolkit for measuring the kinematics of an unknown object in a single-camera video.
"Science is in default for having failed to mount any truly adequate studies of this problem."
— James E. McDonald
Status: early test version (0.2.13), tried on Linux and macOS, and on Windows so far only by its automatic tests.
Install
-
Prerequisite: make sure ffmpeg is installed:
brew install ffmpeg(Mac),winget install Gyan.FFmpeg(Windows),sudo apt install ffmpegorsudo dnf install ffmpeg(Linux). -
Install mcdonald (needs Python 3.10 or newer):
python3 -m pip install mcdonald
-
Check your setup, which also provides instructions on what to do next:
mcdonald setup
When a newer version is out, mcdonald-gui offers to update itself when it starts, and the
command line prints the command to update with.
New to Python or the terminal? docs/install.md walks through each step in detail.
Use
mcdonald has a graphical interface and a command-line interface. The software is intended to be driven by human users and/or AI agents.
The graphical interface is designed to prompt human users through the steps of analysis. To start the graphical interface:
mcdonald-gui
The command-line interface is designed for developers, advanced users, and AI agents. To start the command-line interface and see a summary of options:
mcdonald
Prompting an agent
You can invoke an AI agent to assist at any point in the analysis, whether before or after a human has looked at the video. Here is a sample prompt that you can pass to your favorite command-line AI model:
Please use the mcdonald toolkit to analyze the PR144 video released under PURSUE. Run
mcdonald readmeto get started.
Support
mcdonald is free and open source. To support its development, you can donate through Project Janus at Blue Marble Space, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Donations are tax-deductible as allowed by law.
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Jacob Haqq Misra. Released under the BSD 3-Clause License.
1 maintainer
Metadata
1 maintainer
Release files for mcdonald 0.2.13
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Source distribution (sdist)
| File | Size | Uploaded | Provenance | |
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| mcdonald-0.2.13.tar.gz | 645.6 kB | With provenance | Details |
Built distribution (wheel)
| File | Interpreter | ABI | Platform | Reset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| mcdonald-0.2.13-py3-none-any.whl | Python 3 | none | any | Details |
Total release size: 1.2 MB
Release files / mcdonald-0.2.13.tar.gz
| Download URL | mcdonald-0.2.13.tar.gz |
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| Size | 645.6 kB |
| Tags | Source |
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| Tags | Python 3 |
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