TorchCodec 0.1

TorchCodec 0.1 is out ! It is packed with exciting features, and it is the first release of TorchCodec that we're pushing for wide adoption.

• Installation Instructions
• Getting Started

New features and improvements

GPU Decoding

Decoding can now be done on CUDA GPUs by simply using the device parameter: decoder = VideoDecoder(..., device="cuda"). GPU decoding can lead to faster decoding pipelines in a variety of cases. To learn more on how to use GPU decoding and how to install it, follow our GPU decoding example!

Clip sampling

TorchCodec now supports fast clip samplers in the torchcodec.samplers namespace. We support random and regular sampling for both index-based and time-based strategies. Read more about samplers in our sampling example!

Improvements to VideoDecoder

Note: SimpleVideoDecoder became VideoDecoder! See below for other changes.

• The VideoDecoder class now exposes the following parameter to provide users with more control:

  • num_ffmpeg_threads
  • stream_index

• Two new methods were added: decoder.get_frames_at(indices=[3, 1, 10]) and decoder.get_frames_played_at(seconds=[10.5, 0.3]). When decoding multiple frames, calling these method is a lot faster than calling get_frame_at() or get_frame_played_at() repeatedly.

Read more on the docs.

Speed improvements

Various performance improvements were made, including:

• The decoder now automatically switches between the lower-level swscale and filtergraph libraries. These libraries are mainly used to convert YUV colors to RGB, and swscale usually leads to faster results. TorchCodec relies on one or the other when appropriate.
• We now avoid extra copies of the output frame tensor in batch-decoding APIs

You can find detailed benchmark results on the repo.

MacOS support

TorchCodec now supports MacOS! Just run pip install torchcodec and follow our normal installation instructions.

Breaking changes

TorchCodec is still in development stage and some APIs may be updated in future versions without a deprecation cycle, depending on user feedback. For this release, a few important API changes were made, but we do not anticipate significant changes of the sort in future releases, and we now consider the existing APIs largely stable.

• The SimpleVideoDecoder class was renamed to VideoDecoder
• Methods of VideoDecoder containing the term "displayed" have been changed to the term "played". E.g. get_frame_displayed_at() is now get_frame_played_at(). This is to accommodate for future audio support.
• The get_frames_at() and get_frames_displayed_at() methods have been renamed to get_frames_in_range() and get_frames_played_in_range(). The method names get_frames_at() and get_frames_played_at() still exist, but they do something else (see new features section).

Bug fixes

• Time-based decoding APIs were returning the wrong frame when the timestamp corresponded to the second-to-last frame. See #287 for more details.

TorchCodec 0.0.3

TorchCodec 0.0.3 is out !

This is a small release which fixes decoding frames for H265.

TorchCodec 0.0.2

TorchCodec 0.0.2 is out !

This is a small release which adds the SimpleVideoDecoder.get_frames_displayed_at() method.

TorchCodec 0.0.1

This is the first release of TorchCodec!