Conformance Software Installation

These steps will help you install the VC-2 conformance software, along with its dependencies. The VC-2 conformance software is cross platform and should run on any system with a Python interpreter, however these instructions will only cover the process under Linux.

Python interpreter

The VC-2 conformance software is compatible with both Python 2.7 and Python 3.6 and later. If in doubt, you should prefer Python 3.x. You should also make sure that the pip Python package manager is also installed.

Under Debian-like Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu), Python and pip can be installed using:

# apt install python3 python3-pip

Note

We strongly recommend running the VC-2 conformance software under the standard Python interpreter (‘CPython’) as opposed to other Python implementations (such as PyPy). These alternative implementations are often less stable and we have not tested this software running under them. If you’re not sure which Python interpreter you’ve got on your system you’ll almost certainly have the (correct) standard Python interpreter so there is no need to take any action.

Installation

You can install the VC-2 conformance software using any of the methods below.

From .tar.gz packages

If you have received a copy of the VC-2 conformance software as a collection of .tar.gz packages, these can be installed as follows (replacing X.Y.Z with the version numbers from the files supplied):

$ python -m pip install --user vc2_data_tables-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
$ python -m pip install --user vc2_bit_widths-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
$ python -m pip install --user vc2_conformance_data-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
$ python -m pip install --user vc2_conformance-X.Y.Z.tar.gz

Note

The installation order must be as shown above.

The --user argument can be omitted for a system-wide installation (strongly not recommended) or when installing in a Python virtual environment.

Note

If installation fails on Debian and Ubuntu systems, you might need to execute the following line prior to the above:

$ export PIP_IGNORE_INSTALLED=0

From source (advanced)

The latest VC-2 conformance software can be installed from the source as follows.

First, you must checkout (or download a snapshot of) the following repositories:

Next, each package should be installed (in the order shown above) using the following steps:

$ cd path/to/repo/
$ pip install --user .

The --user argument can be omitted for a system-wide installation (not recommended).

All other dependencies will be downloaded automatically during the installation of these packages.

Verifying installation

To verify installation was successful, try running:

$ vc2-test-case-generator --version

This command should print a version number and then exit immediately. If the command cannot be found, check your PATH includes the directory the conformance software was installed into.

Tip

Under Linux, Python usually installs programmes into $HOME/.local/bin. This can be temporarily added to your path using:

$ export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Next, lets move on to Video file format…