FAQ

What is vidformer NOT?

vidformer is strongly complementary to many tools, but is not:

• A conventional video editor (like Premiere Pro or Final Cut)
• A video database/VDBMS
• A natural language query interface for video
• A computer vision library (like OpenCV)
• A computer vision AI model (like CLIP or YOLO)

If you’re working on any of the latter four, vidformer may be useful for accelerating your visualization workflows.

What video formats does vidformer support?

In short, essentially everything. vidformer uses the FFmpeg/libav* libraries internally, so any media FFmpeg works with should work in vidformer as well. We support many container formats (e.g., mp4, mov) and codecs (e.g., H.264, VP8).

A full list of supported codecs enabled in a vidformer build can be found by running:

vidformer-cli codecs

Can I access remote videos on the internet?

Yes, vidformer uses Apache OpenDAL for I/O, so most common data/storage access protocols are supported. However, not all storage services are enabled in distributed binaries. We guarantee that HTTP, S3, and the local filesystem are always available.

How does vidformer compare to FFmpeg?

vidformer is far more expressive than the FFmpeg filter interface. Mainly, vidformer is designed for data-oriented work, so edits are created programmatically and can reference data. Also, vidformer enables serving result videos on demand.

vidformer uses the FFmpeg/libav* libraries internally, so any media FFmpeg works with should also work in vidformer.

How does vidformer compare to OpenCV/cv2?

vidformer orchestrates data movement, but does not implement image processing directly. Most use cases will still use OpenCV for this.