Making more use of MHL files

with two free QuickLook and Spotlight plugins

As mentioned before, we feel that Media Hash Lists are the perfect sidecar for offloads. However, to most video pros a .mhl file is pretty useless: you can’t search within them, or even preview one. High time to do something about that ⏱

Not much fun in using MHLs this way, right?

Two plugins

We’ve created two free macOS plugins to enable you to make more use of MHLs, one for QuickLook and another for Spotlight. The QuickLook plugin allows you to preview MHLs directly in Finder:

QuickLook MHLs directly in Finder

The second plugin enables Spotlight to index all metadata, turning your Mac into a sort of mini-MAM. Now, you can search all your offloads for clips, metadata and checksums:

Using Spotlight to search within MHLs

We’ve created a convenient installer, which you can download here:

Download MHL Plugins for macOS

You can choose to install the plugins just for you, or for every user of your Mac. The latter requires your Administrator password twice.

That’s it!

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Addendum: External disks

Spotlight does not index your external disks by default. So if Spotlight isn’t giving you the results you’re looking for, use this command in Terminal to tell Spotlight to do so:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/External Disk

You can drag the external disk from Finder into Terminal to auto-fill the /Volumes/... part.

This process can take a while. If it still doesn’t help, you should re-index the complete disk:

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/External Disk