PyAV Hardware Acceleration Module Not Found

[latishab]

Description

When trying to use hardware acceleration with VideoReader, this error occurs:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File ".../examples/process_dive_video.py", line 38, in <module>
    from JaxVidFlow.video_reader import VideoReader
  File ".../src/JaxVidFlow/video_reader.py", line 72, in <module>
    class VideoReader:
  File ".../src/JaxVidFlow/video_reader.py", line 74, in VideoReader
    hwaccel: av.codec.hwaccel.HWAccel | str | None = None, jax_device: Any = None, max_workers: int | None = None):
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: module 'av.codec' has no attribute 'hwaccel'

Environment

• PyAV version: 14.0.1
• Python version: 3.11.0
• OS: macOS 15.1.1

Expected Behavior

Hardware acceleration should be available through av.codec.hwaccel.HWAccel as documented in PyAV's type hints.

Notes

The hwaccel module appears to be missing from av.codec, despite being present in PyAV's type definitions.

After reinstalling the av, it seems like the latest version is 14.0.1, but what you put in requirements.txt is >=14.1.0. After checking the PyAV repo, you also have made changes two weeks ago. Let me know what should be done.

[matthewlai]

Hi Latitia,

Sorry about that. I've only just implemented hardware acceleration in PyAV 2 weeks ago in PyAV-Org/PyAV#1685

It is planned to be part of the 14.1.0 release but that hasn't been released yet.

In the mean time you can install PyAV from Github instead, with FFmpeg from Homebrew.

Something like (sorry untested - I did this a long time ago) -

brew install ffmpeg
git clone https://github.com/PyAV-Org/PyAV.git
cd PyAV
make  # possibly some missing libraries here that you'll have to install through Homebrew
pip uninstall av
pip install .

[latishab]

Great, thanks for the info!