MCAP (pronounced “em-cap”) is a modular container file format for heterogeneous timestamped data. It is ideal for robotics applications, as it can record multiple streams of structured and unstructured data (e.g. ROS, Protobuf, JSON Schema, etc.) in a single file.
MCAP (pronounced “em-cap”) is a modular container file format for heterogeneous timestamped data. It is ideal for robotics applications, as it can record multiple streams of structured and unstructured data (e.g. ROS, Protobuf, JSON Schema, etc.) in a single file.
Benefits
MCAP works well under various workloads, resource constraints, and durability requirements.
Heterogeneous data
- Store messages encoded in multiple serialization formats in a single file
- Include metadata and attachments
Performant writing
- Append-only structure
- Recover partially-written files when data recording is interrupted
Efficient seeking
- Extract data without scanning the entire file
- Fast access to indexed summary data
Self-contained files
- Embed all message schemas in the file
- No extra dependencies needed for decoding
