PanoPlayer

Explore panoramic video, listen to spatial audio, and see sound directions live in VS Code.

Review 180° and 360° video with four-channel first-order Ambisonics (FOA), camera-relative binaural audio, and live PowerMap overlays. Standard mono and stereo media play without spatial processing, locally or through Remote SSH and Cloud IDE.

Get PanoPlayer · Technical reference · Report an issue

Local Web Player

A standalone static web player shares the extension's playback, projection, FOA and analysis core. Open or drop a local media file; media stays in the browser. Run npm ci, npm run build:web, then npm run preview:web and open the printed localhost URL. The generated output/web directory is also suitable for static hosting on Cloudflare Pages. See web development and deployment for requirements, privacy boundaries and Pages settings.

Panorama shows the full ERP reference image. View tabs sit in the transport bar; Projection, Overlay, and Audio settings are grouped below it. This silent example has audio and PowerMap controls disabled.

Explore The Scene

• Panorama: see the unfolded scene and sound directions together.
• Perspective: drag to look around, scroll to change the field of view, and reset to face forward.
• PanoView: a movable panorama overview with the current field of view, toggled from the Overlay row.
• Overlay grid: optional 30-degree azimuth/elevation lines with front, left, right and back labels, in both views. Grid and PowerMap have independent toggles, with opacity in collapsible settings menus; Grid is available even without audio.
• Playback controls: switch view tabs, reset the camera, seek, adjust volume, and mute without reopening the file.
• Range loop: click the repeat button to loop the entire media, or drag across the timeline to loop a selected interval. Click repeat again to clear the loop range. Click the timeline to seek or drag the playhead to scrub; Shift-drag also selects from the playhead. Drag either amber boundary to resize the loop, or focus it and use arrow keys (0.1 s; Shift for 1 s). Seeking outside keeps looping enabled: playback before the range enters it naturally; playback after it continues to the media end, then returns to the loop start. Selection preserves play/pause state and is local to the current player; loop boundaries use ordinary streaming seeks, not sample-accurate gapless playback.

Perspective reconstructs the forward-facing view, with an optional direction grid. The panorama thumbnail marks the current field of view.

See And Hear Sound Directions

Live PowerMap estimates sound directions from four-channel FOA audio during playback. Its settings menu offers PWD / MUSIC, 1 / 2 sources for MUSIC, and opacity. Defaults are MUSIC with one source.

Binaural monitoring uses Omnitone to render FOA for headphones. Turning the Perspective camera changes your listening direction. Stereo Monitor keeps the mix aligned to the recording axes.

FOA+HL treats six-channel audio as four FOA channels followed by head-locked left/right (channels 5/6). HL is mixed into both Binaural and Stereo Monitor without camera rotation or FOA normalization, follows volume/mute, and is excluded from PowerMap. Six-channel speaker-layout audio such as 5.1 is not supported as surround audio.

Audio > Mapper opens a pre-render channel routing matrix. Select FOA Solo to keep channels 1-4 or HL Solo to keep channels 5/6 of a six-channel source. Output rows and input columns support channel swaps, duplication, summing and silent outputs. Direct restores one-to-one routing; turning Enabled off bypasses the mapping without losing it. Changes take effect during playback without seeking or rebuilding the video.

Choose WYZX / WXYZ channel order and SN3D / N3D normalization independently, without reopening the file.

Four channels do not automatically mean FOA. Spatial processing expects first-order Ambisonics, not ordinary quadraphonic speaker audio. PowerMap is for qualitative direction review; the MUSIC source count is an assumption, not automatic detection. It is not a calibrated sound-pressure measurement or source-separation tool.

180°, 360°, And EAC

Auto reevaluates each video, rotation and stereo layout. It is a heuristic, not projection detection: choose EAC or override ERP when needed. Stereo support means single-eye playback, not stereoscopic output to a VR headset.

Rotation corrects the source image clockwise by 0°, 90°, 180° or 270° before stereo cropping and projection. Panorama, Perspective and the overview use the same corrected image; audio and direction overlays stay in their original coordinate system.

Projection Examples

ERP and EAC store the surrounding scene in different layouts. Select the matching projection to reconstruct the viewing direction, rather than stretching the source image into a flat camera view.

360° ERP source	EAC (3×2) source
Longitude and latitude unfold into one panorama, with stretching near the poles.	Six cube faces are packed into two rows; face position and rotation matter.

With Layout: Mono, Perspective, and the same forward-facing camera:

Projection: 360° ERP	Projection: EAC (3×2)

Both show Front upright and centered, with Left and Right at the sides. The overview shows the unfolded panorama and current field of view. EAC must be selected manually; Auto only infers 180° or 360° ERP.

Keep Your Settings

Projection, layout, rotation, view, camera direction, audio, volume, mute, overlay toggles and opacities, PowerMap algorithm and MUSIC source count carry over between files and restarts. Use Restore default settings to reset them without interrupting playback. Playback position is not carried over; local and remote extension hosts keep separate preferences.

Spatial Audio Without Video

Play FOA WAV and FLAC files with a standalone full-sphere PowerMap, channel-order and normalization settings, and binaural monitoring. No placeholder video is needed.

A live direction map from four-channel WAV. Mono and stereo audio automatically use Bypass, without FOA analysis or binaural rendering.

Mono and stereo video retain Panorama and Perspective viewing. Audio passes through with its decoded channels preserved, with volume and mute controls.

Videos without an audio track also play in both views, with seeking and replay. Audio and PowerMap controls are disabled without changing your saved audio preferences.

Streaming And Remote Media

In a text editor, select an absolute media path and choose Play with PanoPlayer from the right-click menu. With no selection, the command uses the current line. Spaces, Unicode names, and paths wrapped in quotes or backticks are supported. Files can be outside the open folder, including mounted network drives. In a remote window, paths refer to the remote host, not your local computer. HTTP and SFTP URLs are not supported.

• Four-channel MP4 + AAC and WebM + Opus use bundled WASM audio decoders. Playback decodes as data arrives rather than waiting for a whole-file transcode.
• MP4, WebM, MOV, MKV, WAV and FLAC are available in Open With. Playback depends on the codecs inside each file.
• FLAC uses incremental decoding through the host browser's WebCodecs FLAC decoder, preserving the source channels without a whole-file conversion; codec support depends on the host browser.
• Local, Remote SSH, and Cloud IDE media are read from the workspace host, without manually downloading the entire file first.
• No extra decoder setup: no user-installed FFmpeg, FFprobe, Python, server, or port forwarding.
• Source files stay unchanged, and media is not uploaded to third-party processing services.

Audio > Track combines source filenames and their tracks in one menu, including track names, languages, channel counts and codecs. The folder button adds audio from another WAV, FLAC, MP4, WebM, MOV or MKV file; choose an entry from the original file to switch back. Four-channel FOA and six-channel FOA+HL tracks use spatial processing, and other channel counts use Bypass. Sources and track choices last only for the current session.

Switching prepares the new audio in the background while the current audio and video continue playing. The replacement takes over at the current time with a short gain transition, without restarting the video decoder or clearing the picture. Paused playback stays paused; a failed load leaves the current audio intact. External audio shares time zero with the video, without automatic content alignment or a manual offset. Playback uses the shorter of the original media and selected audio durations.

The seek bar shows a separate envelope for every decoded source channel, generated progressively in the background. Rows adapt to the channel count within the existing control-bar height; changing tracks replaces the envelope. A shared square-root amplitude scale keeps quieter channels visible without normalizing each channel independently.

Mapping keeps the source channel count unchanged and runs before FOA channel-order conversion, normalization, binaural/stereo rendering and HL mixing. PowerMap follows mapped FOA, while envelopes remain original-source data. Mappings are session-local: same-channel-count track/source switches retain them; a different channel count starts with Direct. Multiple inputs sum at unity gain without automatic attenuation or limiting and may clip.

Video decoding depends on the host browser's WebCodecs support. Perspective view, EAC, rotation and single-eye cropping require WebGL2. Audio playback supports up to the browser's 32-channel limit; higher-channel sources can still display envelopes when their codec is supported. Output channel mapping depends on Web Audio and the playback device. FuMa normalization and arbitrary cube-face layouts are not supported.

Open Your Media

Choose Open With > PanoPlayer on a media file, or run PanoPlayer: Open Media.

Make PanoPlayer The Default

Run Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON) from the Command Palette and add these entries to workbench.editorAssociations:

{
  "workbench.editorAssociations": {
    "*.mp4": "panoPlayer.player",
    "*.webm": "panoPlayer.player"
  }
}

Merge the entries into your existing settings rather than replacing the file. MP4 and WebM files will then open with PanoPlayer by default. Add *.mov, *.mkv *.wav or *.flac with the same value to include those formats. To limit the association to one project, put the entries in that workspace's .vscode/settings.json instead. Remove the entries to return to VS Code's default behavior.

Requires VS Code 1.84+ and a Node extension host with access to workspace files. Cloud IDE must allow Webviews, Workers, WebAssembly, and Web Audio. Browser-only vscode.dev without a remote extension host is not supported.

For installation and development, see the technical reference. See third-party notices for component licenses.