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Have a raw .mcap recording on your machine? You can open it in the Avala Mission Control viewer without creating an account. There are two ways in — the command line and the browser — and both keep the file on your machine.
The local viewer is read-only: it renders your recording so you can inspect camera images, LiDAR point clouds, transforms, and other topics. Annotation, QC, consensus, and sharing live in the full cloud platform — see Upload Workflow.

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Option A — the avala view command

1

Install the CLI

The avala command ships with the Python SDK’s CLI extra:
2

Point it at your recording

This starts a tiny local web server, opens the no-login MCAP viewer in your browser, and streams the file to it over HTTP range requests. The recording never leaves your machine — the viewer reads it back over 127.0.0.1.
Your recording’s filename never leaves your machine — it’s served under an opaque path, so only the loopback URL (not the real basename) is put in the viewer link.
3

Explore, then stop

Scrub the timeline and rearrange panels just like in the cloud viewer. When you’re done, press Ctrl+C in the terminal to stop serving.

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Flags

Viewing over SSH or on a headless box? Run with --no-browser and a fixed --port 53124, forward that port (ssh -L 53124:127.0.0.1:53124 …), then open the printed URL locally. The file is served on 127.0.0.1, so the tunnel is what makes it reachable.

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Option B — drag and drop in the browser

Prefer not to install anything? Open avala.ai/mcap and choose Select from Device. The file is parsed entirely in your browser and never uploaded. This is the same viewer the avala view command opens.

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Take it to the cloud

The local viewer is the fast way to sanity-check a recording. To label it, run quality control, or share it with your team, upload it to a dataset — the same recording becomes an annotation workspace with no reprocessing step.

Upload & annotate

Turn a recording into an annotation workspace: 3D cuboids on point clouds, boxes on camera images, object tracking across frames.

Supported messages

See which ROS and Foxglove schemas map to which panels automatically.