Feature Request: Headless execution of Lichtblick

[thomassedlmayer]

Would it be possible to implement an option/configuration to execute Lichtblick without GUI and automatically traverse every frame of a file (in correct order) once?

Such a feature would enable the automation of tool validation via github actions or similar. It could be used for logging things like Lichtblick's 3D panel scene entities without having to run this locally and click around in the GUI.

Or is there already a way to do something like this?

( @jdsika )

[aneuwald-ctw]

Hello @thomassedlmayer! Lichtblick is primarily a visualization tool, not a data processing framework, so it doesn't currently support running without a GUI for automated frame traversal.

If your goal is to extract and process data from an MCAP file programmatically, I’d recommend using the MCAP library directly: https://mcap.dev/reference. This would allow you to achieve the same result in a more efficient and flexible way. Would that work for your use case?

[thomassedlmayer]

Hi @aneuwald-ctw,
thank you very much for your reply!

I understand that I can extract content from mcap files directly. We actually intend to/or already do this for certain file validation use cases.

But we also want to check how Lichtblick interacts with the extension and if the extension creates expected geometries for the 3D panel based on an input mcap. I also thought about writing a "Lichtblick-replacement-wrapper" that simply traverses the extension's converter function frame by frame but this of course does not verify how Lichtblick traverses the file (and calls the extension).

Maybe an option to automatically start playing a file after startup would be helpful for us already. Would this be possible?

[carolinabamorim]

Hi @thomassedlmayer , Lichtblick is a visualization tool therefore our focus will not be the effort to provide a headless execution, given that it doesn't make much sense in our perspective.
If you want to keep this approach, you will have to manually take the code of your extensions and apply it in your data outside Lichtblick.