Video Grid Comparer (TJ)

The video version of the A/B image compare - but for a folder

Video Grid Comparer (TJ) takes every video in a folder and lays them out in a grid so you can compare a whole batch of renders on one screen. The workflow it's built for is the one every video person actually lives in: same prompt, tweaked settings (seed, sampler, steps, LoRA), a dozen output files - and then the painful part of figuring out which one is actually good.

That's the niche. Where image folks have compare nodes with sliders, video people were left opening files one at a time. This node gives you the "spreadsheet view" of your renders: set folder_path, and it serves the videos as a grid you can watch side by side and pick from.

How it works

It's a pure frontend viewer, and it's honest about it: the backend node's noop() does absolutely nothing on execute - no scanning, no processing, no outputs. All the folder scanning and file serving happens in the pack's API routes (/tj_node/vgc/*), and the grid_layout widget just holds your layout as serialized JSON, saved permanently with the workflow.

That design matters for how you should use it: it's not a processing node, it's a viewer you drop on the canvas and point at a folder. The grid layout you arrange gets saved with the workflow, so it survives save/load/duplicate - set it up once, and every future batch of renders shows up in the same arrangement.

The inputs

Only two, both widgets:

• folder_path - where your videos live. Point it at your render output folder (or a subfolder) and the node lists what's there.
• grid_layout - hidden-ish JSON that persists your grid arrangement. You shouldn't hand-edit this; the UI manages it.

No outputs, no data flow. It's an output node you use purely as a monitor.

Install it

Standard TJ_NODE install, no extra deps:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/designloves2/ComfyUI-TJ_NODE.git

Or ComfyUI Manager → search TJ_NODE, restart. Category: ✨ TJ_Node/Video.

Where people get burned

The biggest misconception is expecting it to produce anything - it's a viewer, so if you wired it into a pipeline expecting an output, you'll stare at a node with no slots. The other realistic annoyance: performance on huge folders. Serving video grids means the browser is streaming a lot of files, so keep the folder scoped (a compare subfolder) rather than pointing at your entire output tree with hundreds of files. Also remember this is strictly "what's already rendered" - it won't render anything for you, and it's not connected to the queue, so the videos it shows are whatever your last run wrote to disk. For the "compare my parameter sweep" workflow specifically, pair it with a queue loop that writes each variation to the same folder and you've got a nice little render farm dashboard.