Video Frameserver for Numpy

Vidsrc is a Python library to read frames from video files as numpy arrays via the DirectShow IMediaDet interface.

Author:	Christoph Gohlke
License:	BSD-3-Clause
Version:	2026.8.8

Quickstart

Install the vidsrc package and all dependencies from the Python Package Index:

python -m pip install -U vidsrc

See Examples for using the programming interface.

Source code and support are available on GitHub.

Requirements

This revision was tested with the following requirements and dependencies (other versions may work):

• CPython 3.12.10, 3.13.15, 3.14.7, 3.15.0rc
• Numpy 2.5.2
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2026 (build)
• DirectX 9.0c SDK (build)
• DirectShow BaseClasses include files (build)
• DirectShow STRMBASE.lib (build)

Revisions

2026.8.8

• Make C++ extension ABI3 and free-threading compatible.
• Drop support for Python 3.11 and numpy 2.0 (SPEC0).
• Support Python 3.15.

2026.1.18

• Use multi-phase initialization.

2025.8.1

• Drop support for Python 3.10, support Python 3.14.

2025.1.6

• Add type hints.
• Drop support for Python 3.9, support Python 3.13 and NumPy 2.

2024.1.6

• Support Python 3.12.
• Drop support for Python 3.8 and NumPy 1.22 (NEP 29).

2022.9.28

• Update metadata.

2021.6.6

• Drop support for Python 3.6 (NEP 29).
• Fix compile error on PyPy3.

2020.1.1

• Drop support for Python 2.7 and 3.5.

Notes

The DirectShow IMediaDet interface is deprecated and may be removed from future releases of Windows (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/directshow/imediadet).

To fix compile error C2146: syntax error: missing ';' before identifier 'PVOID64', change typedef void * POINTER_64 PVOID64; to typedef void * __ptr64 PVOID64; in winnt.h.

Examples

>>> from vidsrc import VideoSource
>>> video = VideoSource('test.avi', grayscale=False)
>>> len(video)  # number of frames in video
48
>>> video.duration  # length in s
1.6016
>>> video.framerate  # frames per second
29.970089850329373
>>> video.shape  # frames, height, width, color channels
(48, 64, 64, 3)
>>> frame = video[0]  # access first frame
>>> frame = video[-1]  # access last frame
>>> for frame in video:
...     pass  # do_something_with(frame)