gsutil and FFmpeg dependencies require manual setup and PATH fixes

[ishaanxgupta]

While running the Physics-IQ benchmark pipeline, we encountered significant friction related to external system dependencies, specifically gsutil and FFmpeg / image I/O tooling.

These dependencies are required at runtime but are not automatically installed, validated, or clearly documented, which led to repeated failures until manual fixes were applied.

Suggested improvements

1. Explicit dependency documentation
-Clearly list required system tools:

• gsutil
• ffmpeg
• ffprobe

2. Include platform-specific install commands:
-Add a lightweight check at startup:

      shutil.which("ffmpeg")
      shutil.which("ffprobe")
      shutil.which("gsutil")

Processing folder: /teamspace/studios/this_studio/evaluated_videos All videos in /teamspace/studios/this_studio/evaluated_videos have FPS: 8.0 
  Generating real videos for FPS 8 from 30FPS... Validation successful for /teamspace/studios/this_studio/physics-IQ-benchmark/physics-IQ-
benchmark/split-videos/testing/30FPS. Starting FPS change process for target FPS: 8.0 Processing: 0001_testing-videos_30FPS_perspective-
left_take-1_trimmed-ball-and-block-fall.mp4 Original FPS: 30.0, Duration: 5.0s, Frames: 150 Original frames: 150, New frames: 40 Saving video with 
dimensions: 3840x2160, Codec: H.264 [ERROR:0@13.350] global cap_ffmpeg_impl.hpp:3018 open Could not find encoder for codec_id=27, error: 
Encoder not found [ERROR:0@13.350] global cap_ffmpeg_impl.hpp:3093 open VIDEOIO/FFMPEG: Failed to initialize VideoWriter

@rgeirhos would love to raise a PR for this

[rgeirhos]

Thanks for reporting, and sorry for the friction - would love to see a PR! Which OS are you using?

[ishaanxgupta]

Thanks for reporting, and sorry for the friction - would love to see a PR! Which OS are you using?

I’m running this on Lightning AI / Cloudspace, which is a Linux (Ubuntu-based) environment without root access (so apt-get isn’t available).
In our case, beyond installation, we also had to manually fix PATH resolution for external tools. For example, ffmpeg / ffprobe were installed via conda but not discoverable until the conda env bin directory was on PATH. Similarly, missing gsutil caused runtime failures until manually addressed.