Hello!
Recently i found that DOpus cannot show me (both in viewer and in thumbnails mode) animated images with WEBPVP8X ANIM ANMF headers. This format is quite popular on, ahem, very interesting sites.
I have decided to go deeper and converted one GIF to Animated WebP format using the first site i found https://ezgif.com/webp-maker and here are my results.
So far i tested these settings, and DOpus cannot show none of these WEBP animations, not even a single frame:
You can download these WEBP sample files here, since this forum does not allow me to upload them WEBP ANIM.zip (68.4 KB)
Source GIF
Also you can open all of these WEBP samples in the latest stable versions of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers. So it must be related some kind of image library, right?
Please, can you change/update that image library in DOpus to support animated WEBP image format(s)?
A non-animated WebP plugin comes with Opus these days.
Animated WebP support might come in the future, but isn't a high priority for us. (It would be a lot of work, at least with the current code, and AFAIK the animated version of the format hasn't really taken off. But if we do extensive work on the viewer code, we'll keep this in mind so that it can piggyback on that.)
There is a viewer plugin API, and source code to the Animated GIF plugin is available, for anyone who wants Animated WebP support badly enough to write their own viewer plugin for it.
(If a Preview Handler for File Explorer / Outlook / etc. exists, that should also work in Opus, too.)
I have asked for this very thing not very long ago. Instead of adapting to the WebP debacle and converting images to gif and whatnot, I have just found a very convenient way that only adds one extra mouseclick to saving the image from the browser to my pc in its original format. I say original because I have learned that the WebP format is being applied to all of these images (gif, png, jpg) by chrome as a means of image compression. The actual files are still stored online in their actual format so it's just a means of circumventing Chrome's default application of Webp format to all images.
If you are curious, I use INternet Download Manager as a download manager, and all I need to do is right-click whatever image I like, "Open image in new tab", and then right-click again in the new tab "Download with IDM". Works like a charm.
Chrome doesn't convert things to webp. That wouldn't make sense as it'd still have to download the original files to do the conversion. (It'd save a tiny amount of space in the local cache folder, but zero bandwidth, and the CPU time wouldn't be worth the disk space to any individual user.)
You'd also never see a gif, png or jpg in Chrome if that were the case, when the reality is that you still see them almost everywhere except on certain servers.
Some web servers serve different image formats to Chrome. Mostly Google ones, as they seem to be the only company that's pushing webp (to save on Google's huge aggregate bandwidth usage, a tiny bit at a time) while the rest of the world carries on as before.
i stand corrected. Thank you for educating me on the actual way it works. Ultimately, however, I am just really happy I don't have to deal with stupid WebP anymore.
Judging by the URL that was displayed when i posted, the format that is served by the site probably depends on the browser and OS's compatibility. But indeed the forum did a thing.
Upload didn't allow it, but i remember now it had to be a zip: Animated-WebP.zip (1.4 MB)
I looked into this a bit and... the format and library for it are just ridiculous. The animated version is a completely different file structure which the normal libwebp calls fail to handle, and will not even return the first frame for. (Search the web for VP8_STATUS_UNSUPPORTED_FEATURE to find lots of other developers running into this.)
We may support animated WebP one day, but not in the near future. (That said, once we move the preview pane to using Edge Chromium for web-related things, you'll be able to play animated WebP images via that. Not as good as the Animated GIF plugin in Opus, but probably good enough for a format almost no one uses, and no one should use.)
You can also get the first frame of animated WebP images by disabling the Opus WebP plugin and allowing the Windows shell to decode the image (as long as Shell Thumbnails are enabled). But that only works in the preview pane, not the standalone viewer. (May also depend on which decoders are installed on the system, or Windows version.)
Thanks, sir. I've found that WebP is also useless if you care about image quality. Either it looks terrible, or you end up at the same size of an equivalent JPG.
Does the web-based thing mean it would be able to handle AVIF as well? In the standalone viewer also? Apparently it's the format derived from AV1, so it should be open source. The files i've seen so far at least look great and are tiny.
Here's some i found on the web of a nice oven: 1635926.zip (597.8 KB)
I'm getting a pink right edge on the thumbnails and preview. But also in Explorer.
They're probably showing because i've installed the AV1 Video Extension from the Microsoft Store.
Anything that works in Edge should display (the same as Edge shows it) once we can use Edge in the viewer.
Same with things that work via shell thumbnails (as least in the preview pane), which may mean AVIF already displays there if you install the appropriate components.
There's no real reason for any of us to start using AV1 though, unless some large companies force us to do so by pushing it on us via their devices or huge websites and browser monoculture. Yet another image format, with marginal advantages and the huge disadvantage of almost nothing supporting it. Not exciting to this old soul, at least.
There's a plugin API for anyone who cares enough to add (more) support for any image format to Opus. For non-animated images, and ignoring read/write metadata editing, it's a simple case of taking a file path and returning a bitmap.
Edge Chromium will only be in use when it's displaying something in the viewer pane. It won't run in the background at other times, at least not on our account.
Hello everyone. While I have not figured out how to get WebP files to display animations in D.O. .... I have found a free application that will convert them to animated GIF...
If you are like me, you do not like having to upload files to the internet so you can download them again.
Chasys Draw IES by John Paul Chacha's Lab
allows you to convert an entire directory of webp files.
The image in the post is a normal animated gif which displays fine in Opus.