Media decoder documentation¶

This library allows you to decode and render video files (and in the future also separate audio files) in Python. The user thus has to take care of the rendering of these frames himself by writing the necessary rendering functions (although modules for rendering sound are included in the package).

There is an internal clock (class Timer) that determines which video and audio frame needs to be rendered at a specified time, and these frames can then (optionally) be passed to a callback functions which take care of the actual rendering. In short, this library should help you get started when you want to implement your own video player and want to have full control over the way audio and video is rendered.

It is based on the (rather excellent) MoviePy module created by Zulko, which offers a convenient Python interface to ffmpeg. This library should hence be able to render any media format that ffmpeg supports. If ffmpeg is not found, moviepy will download it for you on first usage, which may take some time (so keep an eye on that terminal/command prompt to track the download progress).

The play.py contains an example of how to play a video using OpenGL+pygame for the video rendering and pyaudio for audio playback (using pygame.mixer is also an option, but that doesn’t work smoothly yet). You can play a video by calling python play.py <path_to_videofile> from the command line or python play.py -h to view all command line options.

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