Attention

As of June 30, 2025, the Isaac ROS Buildfarm for Isaac ROS 2.1 on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal is no longer supported.

Due to an isolated infrastructure event, all ROS 2 Humble Debian packages that were previously built for Ubuntu 20.04 are no longer available in the Isaac Apt Repository. All artifacts for Isaac ROS 3.0 and later are built and maintained with a more robust pipeline.

Users are encouraged to migrate to the latest version of Isaac ROS. The source code for Isaac ROS 2.1 continues to be available on the release-2.1 branches of the Isaac ROS GitHub repositories.

The original documentation for Isaac ROS 2.1 is preserved below.

Decoding Jetson H.264 Images on Non-NVIDIA Powered Systems

https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/.github/main/resources/isaac_ros_docs/concepts/compression/h264/image_view_h264_decoded.png/

Overview

Using hardware-accelerated Isaac ROS compression to H.264 encode data for playback through Isaac ROS H.264 decoder on NVIDIA-powered systems is fast and efficient. However, you may need to decode recorded data on systems that are not NVIDIA-powered. Fortunately, the output of the isaac_ros_h264_encoder package can be reformatted to work with other available ROS 2 decoder packages.

This tutorial shows you how to replay a rosbag recorded on a Jetson using a third-party H.264 decoder image_transport plugin used in FogROS2.

The launch file replays a target rosbag recorded with isaac_ros_h264_encoder. It is recorded through a node that reformats the compressed messages for compatibility. Then the third-party decoder is used to display it in an image view window.

Tutorial Walkthrough

  1. Complete the quickstart here.

  2. Clone the following third-party repository into your workspace:

    cd ${ISAAC_ROS_WS}/src
git clone https://github.com/clydemcqueen/h264_image_transport.git

# Install dependencies for the third-party package
sudo apt install libavdevice-dev libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev

  3. Launch the Docker container using the run_dev.sh script:

    cd ${ISAAC_ROS_WS}/src/isaac_ros_common && \
  ./scripts/run_dev.sh

  4. Inside the container, build the third-party h264_image_transport package:

    cd /workspaces/isaac_ros-dev && \
  colcon build --symlink-install --packages-up-to \
    h264_image_transport isaac_ros_to_h264_msgs_packet && \
  source install/setup.bash

  5. Launch the graph to bring up an image viewer that shows the decoded output.

    ros2 launch isaac_ros_to_h264_msgs_packet h264_compatible_decoder.launch.py rosbag_path:=/workspaces/isaac_ros-dev/src/isaac_ros_compression/resources/rosbags/h264_compressed_sample.bag

    Note

    You may have to click on the “/image” to trigger window resizing.