We are releasing TorchCodec 0.8.1 which is bug-fix release, compatible with torch 2.9.

The fix

In 0.8 we introduced our new "beta" backend which is much faster than our existing CUDA decoder (try it!!). But we also introduced a hard dependency on libnvcuvid.so, which isn't always available on the users machine. This would cause issues when import torchcodec was run.

We have now removed the hard dependency on libnvcuvid.so: if it cannot be found at runtime, the VideoDecoder will gracefully fallback to the CPU. This should resolve a lot of the ongoing import torchcodec errors. We're working on exposing an API that allows the user to know whether they're falling back to the CPU.

Thanks again to @traversaro for the original diagnosis and for the help testing the fix on Windows!

Enhancement

We also added support for FFmpeg 8 on Windows - we now support FFmpeg 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 across all platforms (Linux, MacOS and Windows).