Unable to load '*.webp' as a picture

I see that animated webp should be supported and that if there are particular problematic files that I should start a new thread with a zip.

Here are a few animated .webp files that will open in Irfan and Chrome but not in Directory Opus 13.7. Thanks for any investigation/help!

webp-wont-open-opus-13.7.zip (11.1 MB)

Screen I get with the error:

Animated WebP isn't supported (never has been). It's a completely different file format, for some reason, so even the first frame won't display.

We may add support for it in the future, but it's a lot of work to add new animated formats (unless they play via the video APIs), and animated WebP doesn't seem to be taking off, at least on the mainstream web, on top of being a poorly designed file format (hence the first frame not even displaying like it would with a GIF in a program that didn't understand animated GIFs).

In a similar case:
Apple Safari is the only web browser supporting the "JPEG XL" image format, but it doesn't support animations, which can be checked on the JPEG XL Test Page, displaying only a still image.

The successor of WebP, AVIF, is slowly gaining momentum, now that all mainstream browsers have support for the format, and I assume that it will eventually stop the rise of WebP.

Regards
Guido
JPEG developer