VapourSynth R49 documentation

# Installation Instructions

## Windows Installation Instructions

### Prerequisites

First download and install the prerequisites:

  - Python 3.8.x – 32 or 64 bit version depending on which version of VapourSynth you want to install

Note that VapourSynth and Python have to be matched so both are either installed for all users or for only for the current user.

Also note that per user installs will not install the required visual studio 2019 runtimes.

### Installation

Simply run the VapourSynth installer. It should automatically detect everything.

Test it by opening a Python command line (should be added to your start menu) and type this:

    from vapoursynth import core
    print(core.version())

After typing the final line you should see the version printed along with a few other lines describing the options used when instantiating the Core object. If this for some reason fails, there may be a bug in the installer or there are old copies of vapoursynth.pyd and vapoursynth.dll lying around.

## Windows Portable Instructions

First download and decompress the prerequisites:

  - Python 3.8.x – 32 or 64 bit embeddable version

Simply decompress the portable VapourSynth archive into the Python dir and overwrite all existing files. Done.

You can also use the VapourSynth Editor by decompressing it into the same directory.

## OS X Installation from Packages

First download and install the prerequisites:

  - Xcode – Available from the AppStore

  - Homebrew – A package manager

Simply run these commands in a terminal and wait for them to complete:

    brew install vapoursynth

## Linux Installation from Packages

Several distributions have packages:

> - Debian – deb-multimedia

> - Gentoo – Portage overlay and instructions

> - Arch Linux – Official packages

## Installation via PIP (PyPI)

You can install the Python wrapper using pip.

Install vapoursynth using Pip by using this command:

    pip install VapourSynth

Please note that you always need to have a working installation of VapourSynth beforehand. Note that on non-Windows systems, the installer will compile the module before installing.

## Linux and OS X Compilation Instructions

These are the requirements:

  - Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool, probably recent versions

  - pkg-config

  - GCC 4.8 or newer, or Clang

  - zimg v2.9 branch

  - Python 3

  - Cython 0.28 or later installed in your Python 3 environment

  - Sphinx for the documentation (optional)

  - iconv, libass, and ffmpeg for the Subtext plugin (optional)

  - ImageMagick 7 for the Imwri plugin (optional)

  - Tesseract 3 for the OCR plugin (optional)

Note: any version of Python 3 will do. A specific version is only required when using the official Windows binaries.

### Required packages (OS X)

First download and install the prerequisites:

  - Xcode – Available from the AppStore

  - Homebrew – A package manager

Installation of the required packages is very easy. Simply run these commands in a terminal and wait for them to complete:

    brew install python3 ffmpeg libass zimg imagemagick
    pip3 install cython

If you’ve already installed all the required packages and instead want to update them, simply run:

    brew update && brew upgrade
    pip3 install --upgrade cython

### Compilation

If you haven’t checked out the source code before, use git to do so:

    git clone https://github.com/vapoursynth/vapoursynth.git

Or if you already have a copy of the source, update it with:

    git pull

Enter the VapourSynth directory and run these commands to compile and install:

    ./autogen.sh
    ./configure
    make
    make install

Depending on your operating system’s configuration, VapourSynth may not work out of the box with the default prefix of /usr/local. Two errors may pop up when running `vspipe --version`:

- “vspipe: error while loading shared libraries: libvapoursynth-script.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”

  This is caused by the non-standard location of libvapoursynth-script.so.0. Your dynamic loader is not configured to look in /usr/local/lib. One way to work around this error is to use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable:

      $ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib vspipe --version

- “Failed to initialize VapourSynth environment”

  This is caused by the non-standard location of the Python module, vapoursynth.so. Your Python is not configured to look in /usr/local/lib/python3.x/site-packages. One way to work around this error is to use the PYTHONPATH environment variable:

      $ PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python3.x/site-packages vspipe --version

  Replace “x” with the correct number.

The documentation can be built using its own Makefile:

    $ make -C doc/ html

The documentation can be installed using the standard program `cp`.