VidGear Stable v0.3.4

[abhiTronix]

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This release significantly enhances VidGear’s robustness, developer experience, and future readiness. The primary focus is on adding comprehensive type hints across all public APIs, modernizing dependencies, and deeply restructuring documentation to improve clarity, navigation, and accessibility.

📓 Complete Release Notes can be found here ↗️

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VidGear is free and open source and will always remain so. ❤️

It is something I am doing with my own free time. But so much more needs to be done, and I need your help to do this. For just the price of a cup of coffee 🍵, you can make a difference 🤝

What's Changed (Highlights)

New Features ✨

• Core:
  • Type Hints: Added comprehensive type hints to function signatures and return types across all API modules for improved code readability and IDE support.
• Docs:
  • Docker Guide: Added a comprehensive new guide, detailing the challenges of containerizing VidGear, particularly around building OpenCV with correct GStreamer and FFmpeg support.
  • Sponsor Recognition: Added prominent sponsor section in the README.md and a new dedicated "Our Sponsors" page to highlight and thank supporters.

Updates/Improvements ⚡️

• Core:
  * Migrated from deprecated pkg_resources to packaging library for version parsing to ensure compatibility with future Python versions.
  * Replaced yt_dlp dependency with yt-dlp[default].

Breaking Updates/Changes 💥

• Setup.py:
  • 💣 Raised minimum Python version requirement from 3.8+ to 3.10+ to ensure long-term support.
  • 💣 VidGear no longer installs opencv-python automatically as a dependency when installed from source. Users must now manually install their preferred OpenCV binaries (e.g., opencv-python, opencv-contrib-python) as a prerequisite.
• StreamGear:
  • 💣 The terminate() method is now formally deprecated and will be removed in a future release. The close() method should be used instead for safer process termination.

Bug-fixes 🐛

• Core:
  • Various minor bug fixes and improvements across the codebase as part of the type hint additions and dependency updates.
  • .gitignore expanded to standard Python template (covers caches, build, virtualenvs, packaging artifacts, IDE metadata).
  • Increased consistency in logging and error surfacing.

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This discussion was created from the release VidGear Stable v0.3.4.