Struggling to read a grayscale video in

General Usage
1

I’m struggling to figure out how to read in a UInt8 grayscale video.

  1. read(open(videofilename)) isn’t working on this video format. I just get a 1D array of UInt8 that’s about 20k elements longer than the video should be based on w x h x nframes
  2. VideoIO.jl doesn’t support current FFMPEG versions, and I can’t make it use older versions Precompilation LoadError: could not open file ...src/ffmpeg/AVUtil/v56/LIBAVUTIL.jl · Issue #131 · JuliaIO/VideoIO.jl · GitHub
  3. FFmpegPipe.jl gets close but seems like forces reading the single channel video as RGB channels, resulting in a frame that’s 3x taller than it should be (using 3 successive frames, from what I can tell). readpngdata for grayscale · Issue #4 · perrutquist/FFmpegPipe.jl · GitHub

Any ideas appreciated. I’d like most to have a basic function where I can tweak ffmpeg to match the source format and control the codec precisely. I’m writing videos like that based on the example given here: Creating a video from a stack of Images - #8 by stillyslalom

2

Also, FileIO isn’t able to read the video:

using FileIO
obj = load("test.avi")

Error encountered while loading "test.avi". Fatal error:

DelegateFailed `'ffmpeg' -nostdin -v -1 -vframes %S -i '%i' -vcodec pam -an -f rawvideo -y '%u.pam' 2> '%Z'' @ error/delegate.c/InvokeDelegate/1919
3

It seems that the 3x taller issue with FFmpegPipe.jl was actually because of an oddity in how Image J saves it’s AVIs, with 3 duplicated grayscale channels, or something to that effect.

I’ve hardcoded a stride into my FFmpegPipe code for now and it seems to work.

But it is VERY slow… Lots of small readbytes() seem to be slowing things down significantly

4

Yes, as I mentioned in the issue, the readpngdata could be much better implemented using IOBuffers. I hadn’t properly learned how to use these in Julia at the time that I wrote it. (And read speed didn’t matter for what I needed it for.)

However, I suspect a lot of the slowdown comes from the fact that each frame is compressed as a png and then immediately decompressed. If you want to write something faster, it’s proabably be better to go with an uncompressed intermediate format.

5

Better would be to reduce the output framerate of ffmpeg with the r_out keyword argument. That way you don’t waste time on transferring frames that will not be used.