fast video encoding

[sturlamolden]

On 29 Jul, 10:14, gregorth <gregor.thalham... at gmail.com> wrote:

> for a scientific application I need to save a video stream to disc for
> further post processing.

I have worked a bit on this as well. There are two things that make
scientific applications different form common video encoding:

First, a scientific video stream is often very different from a
'movie': There are usually very little 'movement'. For example, when I
have filmed a mouse swimming in a water maze (a pool of milky white
water), the only thing that moves is the rat. So I could achieve
excellent compression just by saving the pixels that changed.

Second, scientific data should be stored with lossless compression if
possible.

Common video codecs are aimed at films and home video, not scientific
video streams.

I don't know how your data are, but I would be very picky about the
codec. And chances are you will be better off home-brewing your own
domain specific compression.

If you need to store large amounts of scientific data, consider using
something like a HDF5 database for storage. There are two Python
wrappers for HDF5 that I know of (h5py and PyTables).