About

vsmkv is a FUSE-based virtual filesystem for exporting VapourSynth scripts as uncompressed videos in the Matroska (MKV) file format.

Note: this is a proof of concept and will likely not work properly (for example might mess up timing)

Dependencies

FUSE, CMake and a compiler supporting the C++14 shared mutex (e.g., GCC >= 5.2) are required.

Running the unit tests requires the Criterion framework to be installed.

Installation

from the commandline:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make

For building unit tests, run cmake ../ -Dtest=ON instead of the regular cmake command above. This will build the vsmkv_test binary. Note that the regular binary will be built with debug symbols if the test flag is specified.

Running

The command requires two arguments. First, the path to your VapourSynth script. Second, an empty directory for mounting the filesystem. Additionally, a number of parameters inherited from FUSE may be specified (e.g., -s for running in single threaded mode or -f for running in foreground mode instead of daemonizing):

cd /tmp
mkdir output
/path/to/vsmkv test.vpy output -f

Finally, a player supporting uncompressed video in MKV files can be used to play back the videos (first output node in this example):

cd /tmp/output
mpv node_0

Limitations

• Currently, only planar YUV color spaces are supported.
• Concurrent access to the same video from multiple programs (or threads of the same program) results in constant allocation and de-allocation of frames with a huge performance penalty.
• The software lacks proper logging and error handling for now - errors result in uncaught exceptions.
• The filesystem needs to be remounted after changing the VapourSynth script file
• No Windows support (yet) due to the missing native FUSE implementation. Crossmeta FUSE may possibly work.