PyTorch has shifted every media decoding and encoding function into a single library called TorchCodec. The change means that TorchVision and TorchAudio no longer provide I/O APIs; they now only offer transforms for tensors. TorchCodec works on both CPU and GPU and supports many formats via FFmpeg and other codecs. All three libraries are now ABI‑stable, so they can be updated without rebuilding PyTorch.
Why it matters
Developers can get faster, simpler media handling by using TorchCodec and rely on stable libraries for transforming data.
