Fastest Way to Read a Frame from a Video File

What is the quickest way to chop a video file into frames? I know of two methods: readFrame() and vision.VideoFileReader() in conjunction with step(). Are their any other methods that are faster than these two? I need to be able to move through videos as fast as possible.

Thanks, Ian

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Yes, there are faster ways. You can construct HDL for a custom chip, or program an FPGA to read byte streams that are video files and decode them.

Be sure to store the data on a fast SSD, especially one constructed with Intel's 3D XPoint memory, perhaps using Optane Technology

Or, since MATLAB's routines are wrappers around operating-system provided media reading library, you could shave off a few microseconds here and there by writing a mex interface to an appropriate media reading library without doing any error checking.