How to pass bit_stream_t to ndarray or something similar?

It seems that the bytes in bit_stream_t cannot be visited in Python, although a _data_ property is defined. In fact, an error occurs when I try calling enc.bit_stream.data, and the only way possible to see what the bytes are exactly is to save the bitstream to a file. Is there anything I can do to read and write bytes to bit_stream_t more conveniently?