From 2013-2015, members of the Bay Area Video Coalition’s Preservation Department worked closely with a technical team led by Dave Rice on a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded research and development project. The result of this work was QCTools, free and open source quality control software designed to aid in the analysis of reformatted analog video materials. The following white paper describes the motivations, technical developments, challenges, and future prospects for the QCTools effort. Adopted widely within the audiovisual preservation community, QCTools is significant both for the functions its serves, and for what it represents: that we can, and should, design these tools for ourselves, rather than relying on proprietary, stretched-to-fit, corporate solutions. And given the inevitable decline of magnetic media, there is no time to delay.