Video codec limitations in image reader

Dear All,

it seems that KNIME has a limited number of Codecs that are accepted for reading video files (e.g. avi) using the image reader. There are tools to convert videos and codes but it would be more handy if videos could be converted in KNIME or read directly by the KNIME image reader. Is there any way to extend the compatibility of the video codecs? For instance we would be interested in using one of the following codecs (all failed to be imported):

* H264-MPG4-AVC               
* MPEG2               
* MPEG4 (fmpg4)
* Windows Media Video 7

Codecs that are supported are for instance jpeg.

Thanks in advance for assistance.

Stefan

Hi Stefan,

there are several ways to tackle this problem. We just didn't find the time yet to approach it.

Short-Term solution:

* In order to get your images into KNIP you could try to use the Python integration of KNIME in combination with the KNIP nodes. Just pass e.g. a string to the python script and then use some python library to read the videos and write them back to KNIME. This is certainly not the most elegant solution for the problem as (potentially very large) data gets shipped from python to KNIME, however it should work.

Long-Term Solution:

* We heavily rely on the SCIFIO project to read images from disc in arbitrary formats. The SCIFIO  (http://github.com/scifio) library could be extended by an FFMPEG reader (which is able to read most of the formats).

I hope this helps,

Christian

 

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Hi Christian,

we solved the problem by generating a bat file within the the KNIME workflow and calling an ffmpeg script via the external tool node. Developing a KNIP script is rather complicated if you are not experienced with python programming. However, a long-term solution within KNIME would be highly appreciated.

Stefan

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