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by aub3bhat 2954 days ago
Scanner is a great tool I have been following it's development very closely over the last year. Great to see it reach 1.0 . I highly recommend checking out Hwang [1] (a sparse video decoder) which is bundled and used in Scanner.

Scanner is one of the first few tools to leverage Docker/Kubernetes by demonstrating ability to ship complex heterogenous architecture in a reliable/reproducible manner.

[1] https://github.com/scanner-research/hwang

1 comments

I am not an expert in video encoding. Just curious, what does Hwang offer that ffmpeg doesn't?
Hwang lets you perform "efficient random access" across the video by building a GOP/Segment aware index. This comes in handy in a lot of applications where you want to access particular frame or set of frames but do not wish to decode and store all frames. Most tools such as ffmpeg (command line application not library) are optimized for sequential decode use case.
> Hwang is a library for performing fast decode of frames from h.264 encoded video (most mp4s). Hwang provides both a Python and C++ API. Hwang decodes on the CPU (using ffmpeg) or on the GPU (using the NVIDIA hardware decoder).