Syphon Viewer

Watch a Syphon video stream inside VS Code, in an editor tab beside your code.

Useful when you are writing shaders or building generative visuals in one window and want to see the output without switching apps.

Requirements

• macOS on Apple Silicon
• VS Code 1.135 or later

Intel Macs and Windows are not supported.

Getting started

1. Start an app that publishes video over Syphon.
2. Press Cmd+Shift+P to open the Command Palette, type Syphon Viewer, and run Syphon Viewer: Open Preview. The preview opens in a tab beside your code.
3. Pick a source from the dropdown and press Connect.

The dropdown lists whatever is publishing on your Mac right now, and follows sources as they appear and disappear. If one you were watching comes back under the same name, the preview reconnects on its own.

Fidelity

Frames arrive at the source resolution, uncompressed. The preview is bit-identical to what the source published — no scaling, no codec, no chroma subsampling, no colour drift.

There is nothing to tune. A frame is skipped whenever the previous one is still being written, so the preview runs as fast as your machine allows and settles on its own: roughly 60fps at 1080p, 30fps at 4K.

Processing stops entirely while the tab is in the background, so leaving the preview open costs nothing when you are not looking at it.

Settings

License

MIT.

This extension bundles Syphon.framework, which is BSD 3-Clause licensed (Copyright 2010 Tom Butterworth & Anton Marini). Its full license text ships with the extension in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.txt.

Syphon Viewer is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Syphon Project.