v0.3 latent modality — VAE latents on the wire
Image and video diffusion models now stream VAE latents instead of decoded pixels. 48× smaller wire weight, decode at the leaf.
Codec v0.3 extends the framing surface from text-tokens to VAE latents. Two new engine forks ship as pre-built Docker images:
codec-comfyui— ComfyUI with the v0.3 latent transport patch. Production image-gen with the full ComfyUI workflow surface.codec-diffusers— the HuggingFace diffusers reference path. Doubles as the bench/golden perceptual-conformance reference for every Codec latent client.
Same wire shape; same registry; same LatentStreamDecoder in @codecai/web handles both.
A 512×512 RGB frame at fp16 is ~1.5 MB; the SD-1 latent that produced it is 4×64×64 fp16 = 32 KB — a 48× reduction. Per-channel int8 quantization on top, and (for video) delta-coding against keyframes, take it further. The client runs vae_decode locally — pixels never touch the wire.