TensorFlow - Read video frames from TFRecords file

Encoding each frame as a separate feature makes it difficult to select frames dynamically, because the signature of tf.parse_example() (and tf.parse_single_example()) requires that the set of parsed feature names be fixed at graph construction time. However, you could try encoding the frames as a single feature that contains a list of JPEG-encoded strings:

def _bytes_list_feature(values):
    """Wrapper for inserting bytes features into Example proto."""
    return tf.train.Feature(bytes_list=tf.train.BytesList(value=values))

with tf.python_io.TFRecordWriter(output_file) as writer:

  # Read and resize all video frames, np.uint8 of size [N,H,W,3]
  frames = ... 

  features = {}
  features['num_frames']  = _int64_feature(frames.shape[0])
  features['height']      = _int64_feature(frames.shape[1])
  features['width']       = _int64_feature(frames.shape[2])
  features['channels']    = _int64_feature(frames.shape[3])
  features['class_label'] = _int64_feature(example['class_id'])
  features['class_text']  = _bytes_feature(tf.compat.as_bytes(example['class_label']))
  features['filename']    = _bytes_feature(tf.compat.as_bytes(example['video_id']))

  # Compress the frames using JPG and store in as a list of strings in 'frames'
  encoded_frames = [tf.compat.as_bytes(cv2.imencode(".jpg", frame)[1].tobytes())
                    for frame in frames]
  features['frames'] = _bytes_list_feature(encoded_frames)

  tfrecord_example = tf.train.Example(features=tf.train.Features(feature=features))
  writer.write(tfrecord_example.SerializeToString())

Once you have done this, it will be possible to slice the frames feature dynamically, using a modified version of your parsing code:

def decode(serialized_example, sess):
  # Prepare feature list; read encoded JPG images as bytes
  features = dict()
  features["class_label"] = tf.FixedLenFeature((), tf.int64)
  features["frames"] = tf.VarLenFeature(tf.string)
  features["num_frames"] = tf.FixedLenFeature((), tf.int64)

  # Parse into tensors
  parsed_features = tf.parse_single_example(serialized_example, features)

  # Randomly sample offset from the valid range.
  random_offset = tf.random_uniform(
      shape=(), minval=0,
      maxval=parsed_features["num_frames"] - SEQ_NUM_FRAMES, dtype=tf.int64)

  offsets = tf.range(random_offset, random_offset + SEQ_NUM_FRAMES)

  # Decode the encoded JPG images
  images = tf.map_fn(lambda i: tf.image.decode_jpeg(parsed_features["frames"].values[i]),
                     offsets)

  label  = tf.cast(parsed_features["class_label"], tf.int64)

  return images, label

(Note that I haven't been able to run your code, so there may be some small errors, but hopefully it is enough to get you started.)

Since you're using very similar dependencies, I suggest to take a look at the following Python package as it addresses your exact problem setting:

pip install video2tfrecord

or refer to https://github.com/ferreirafabio/video2tfrecord. It should also be adaptable enough to use tf.data.Dataset.

disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the package.