Installation

The following instructions will work on Linux or Mac. If you’re on Windows, I recommend looking into the Windows Subsystem for Linux

The easiest way to install plenoptic is with pip within a new conda environment (if you do not have conda installed on your machine, I recommend starting with miniconda):

$ conda create --name plenoptic pip python=3.9
$ conda activate plenoptic
$ pip install plenoptic

You can also install it directly from source:

$ conda create --name plenoptic pip python=3.9
$ conda activate plenoptic
$ # clone the repository
$ git clone https://github.com/LabForComputationalVision/plenoptic.git
$ cd plenoptic
$ # install in editable mode with `-e` or, equivalently, `--editable`
$ pip install -e .

ffmpeg and videos

Several methods in this package generate videos. There are several backends possible for saving the animations to file, see matplotlib documentation for more details. In order to convert them to HTML5 for viewing (and thus, to view in a jupyter notebook), you’ll need ffmpeg installed and on your path as well. Depending on your system, this might already be installed, but if not, the easiest way is probably through conda: conda install -c conda-forge ffmpeg.

To change the backend, run matplotlib.rcParams['animation.writer'] = writer before calling any of the animate functions. If you try to set that rcParam with a random string, matplotlib will tell you the available choices.

Jupyter

If you wish to locally run the notebooks, you will need to install jupyter, ipywidgets, and (for some of the notebooks) torchvision (you can also run them in the cloud using Binder). There are two main ways of getting a local jupyter install` working with this package:

Install jupyter in the same environment as plenoptic. If you followed the instructions above to create a conda environment named plenoptic, do the following:
```
$ conda activate plenoptic
$ conda install -c conda-forge jupyterlab ipywidgets torchvision
```
This is easy but, if you have multiple conda environments and want to use Jupyter notebooks in each of them, it will take up a lot of space.

Use nb_conda_kernels. Again, if you followed the instructions to create a conda environment named plenoptic:

$ # activate your 'base' environment, the default one created by conda/miniconda
$ conda activate
$ # install jupyter lab and nb_conda_kernels in your base environment
$ conda install -c conda-forge jupyterlab ipywidgets
$ conda install nb_conda_kernels
$ # install ipykernel and torchvision in the plenoptic environment
$ conda install -n plenoptic ipykernel torchvision

This is a bit more complicated, but means you only have one installation of jupyter lab on your machine.

In either case, to open the notebooks, navigate to the examples/ directory under this one on your terminal and activate the environment you install jupyter into (plenoptic for 1, base for 2), then run jupyter and open up the notebooks. If you followed the second method, you should be prompted to select your kernel the first time you open a notebook: select the one named “plenoptic”.