wtf is splats4d?

splats4D is a file format and toolset for compressing and streaming 4D Gaussian splats, a technique for representing moving 3D scenes as clouds of colored points instead of traditional video or polygon models. It takes a sequence of individual splat frames, essentially a short video made of point clouds, and packs them into one small file that a viewer can stream and seek through smoothly, similar to how a video file works. The project's core idea is that every value in every frame stays within a limit you choose in advance compared to the original data, so compression never introduces unpredictable errors, only ones that are known and controlled. On a sample test scene, it shrank a 1.6 gigabyte sequence down to about 83 megabytes with default settings, and further to about 41 megabytes with more aggressive settings, well beyond what standard general-purpose compression tools achieve on the same data. Under the hood, it separates parts of the scene that never move from parts that do, so static backgrounds are stored once rather than repeated in every frame. It groups frames into chunks similar to how video compression works, so a viewer can jump to any point in the timeline by downloading only a small piece of the file rather than the whole thing. The included viewer, built to closely match an existing well-known splat renderer, uses a fast graphics technology called WebGPU when available, falling back to an older but still capable option when it is not. The format is specifically designed to be streamed directly from ordinary cloud storage services like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Cloudflare R2, using simple partial-file downloads rather than needing a dedicated video server. The project includes a command-line encoder written in Rust, distributed as a Python package, along with a web-based viewer built with modern JavaScript tools, and is released under the MIT license.