MCAP Authoring Errors: 6 Silent Bugs and How to Fix Them

Manually authoring MCAP files from raw sensor data can produce structurally valid files that nevertheless fail or contain subtle errors during playback, largely because serialization and validation often cannot verify semantic correctness. Common issues include declaring Foxglove schemas with JSON rather than their required protobuf encoding, incorrectly placing full epoch nanoseconds or negative values in the bounded nsec field, using inconsistent calibration field casing or SDK versions, and relying on fragile custom PLY or PCD parsers that silently misread real-world layouts. The most difficult errors involve incorrect coordinate conventions, incompatible calibration matrices, and sensors sharing a schema while using different clock domains, since these files may decode and play normally despite representing wrong geometry or timestamps. Recommended practices include retrieving official schemas and encodings from the SDK, centralizing timestamp conversion, inspecting actual message-class documentation, using established file-format libraries, adding numeric assertions for transforms and calibration, and checking playback timelines as well as file structure.

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