Compressed video support in Slicer

Support
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Compressed video support for 3D Slicer is available in both the 4.10.2 and 4.11.0 releases.

For users:

  • Requires Sequences, SlicerOpenIGTLink and SlicerIGSIO extensions
  • Video recording and playback
  • Save and load MKV files encoded with VP9
  • Stream compressed video through OpenIGTLink
  • Storage space for 60 sec, 10 fps, 640x480 video:
    • Before: ~222.6 MB, 30s
    • Now: ~37.1 MB, <1s
  • Video sequences can be re-encoded with different settings/compression levels

For developers:

  • Compressed video frames are stored using vtkMRMLStreamingVolumeNode, which handles decoding and encoding of video frames.
  • Frame data is represented using vtkStreamingVolumeFrame, which contains frame metadata, as well as pointer to the previous frame in the decoding sequence.
  • New codecs can be added to Slicer by subclassing vtkStreamingVolumeCodec and registering it with vtkStreamingVolumeCodecFactory.
  • Documentation for compressed video is here: https://www.slicer.org/wiki/Documentation/Nightly/Developers/CompressedVideo

Suggestions and feedback are welcome.

This work was made possible through collaboration with Longquan Chen and Harvard SNRL.
Development was funded in part by CANARIE’s Research Software Program.

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