Nomacs - viewer for webp animations

[wiak]

I often use commandline program sxiv with -a option to play animated gifs. It is a great wee program.
[INFO] Hi there
Image Lounge 3.17.0
However, webp animations seem to be replacing animated gifs on the web - and not surprisingly, webp is very efficient. Unfortunately, I have not found any library that lets sxiv play animated webp files. Certainly my WDL_Arch64 Chromium browser can do so, but I'm looking for a simpler viewer for my WDL_Arch64 system.

Anyway, after much searching I've found one, but only one thus far:

nomacs, which is a qt-based program (qt5 on my system anyway). This turns out to be a big program (huge compared to the gpicview I was using as my GUI graphics viewer previously). However, I'm fast moving away from 'minimalism' in terms of my preferred applications. Fact is, nomacs, for example, contains tons more features (and great ones) than the likes of gpicview and though it uses more resources, there are plenty of resources available on my system... I don't have Inkscape lite on my computer at all - why? - becauhttps://nomacs.org//wp-content/uploads/2012/03/UserManual.pdfse it is rubbish compared to Inkscape full, so why bother installing it (???) when, for me, inkscape full is one of the most important/useful programs out there. Anyway, nomacs is fantastic - not only plays animated webp and any other image format I know about, but also:

https://nomacs.org/

It is able to browse images in zip or MS Office files which can be extracted to a directory. Metadata stored with the image can be displayed and you can add notes to images.
...
nomacs includes image manipulation methods for adjusting brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, gamma, exposure. It has a pseudo color function which allows creating false color images. A unique feature of nomacs is the synchronization of multiple instances. With this feature you can easily compare images by zooming and/or panning at the exactly same position or even by overlaying them with different opacity.
nomacs is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 and available for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac, and OS/2. It is free for private and commercial use.

Yeah, it is a 30MB download on my WDL_Arch64 and 100MB installed - big deal - I've chucked out gpicview, which is rubbish in comparison to nomacs... why struggle on with rubbish???!

Oh well, I used to want to use GTK-only, but fact is I keep finding Qt-based programs that are better/more-sophisticated. However, I'd be delighted to know if anyone finds any other graphics viewer (other than a web browser) that can play animated gifs stored locally (whether Qt-based or GTK-based app). I can't find a single one (and I've tried with all sorts of webp-related libs installed such as libwebp... no go). I could I suppose convert animated webp files to the likes of animated gifs using ffmpeg, but that's not what I'm looking for (and it's apparently far from trivial to convert animated webp to gif using ffmpeg - I've read it is necessary to extract individual frames first - painful...)

Anyway, thumbs up big time from me for "nomacs" (by the way gthumb couldn't do it and best I could get working in sxiv was non-animated webp though I needed to both compile and install imlib2-webp from here for that, which also allowed non-animated webp viewing via feh: https://github.com/gawen947/imlib2-webp).

By the way, I am not simply looking for googled answers... I have googled plenty and some claims that viewer could handle webp turned out to either not be true or non-animated webp only. I want to know of any app actually tested and known to work.

If none found, still: nomacs recommended...

In rolling release WDL_Arch64 command:

Code: Select all

nomacs --version

currently says:

Code: Select all

[INFO] Hi there
Image Lounge 3.17.0

which seems to be latest release.

wiak

[wiak]

Oh well, I know nothing about using Python, but found a link about converting animated webp file to animated gif using something called Python "Pillow"

https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... mation-cli

Was last answer... this:

Code: Select all

from PIL import Image
im = Image.open('your_file.webp')
im.save('your_file.gif', 'gif', save_all=True, optimize=True, background=0)

Yes, I had no idea how to actually use the above, and didn't know what Python Pillow was.
https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable ... orial.html
(I should put a link to this information under WeeDog -> Programming if not mixing my WeeDogLinux work with Puppy OS and so on since 'bigpup' objects to that... sigh...)
So, using my WDL_Arch64 system, I just tried getting pacman to tell me via pacman search command:

Code: Select all

pacman -Ss pillow

and that came back with pacman search information:

community/python-pillow 8.3.1-1
Python Imaging Library (PIL) fork.

So I installed that with command:

Code: Select all

pacman -Sy python-pillow

(it was only a 0.7MiB download, 3.12MiB install on my system).

I had a short animated webp file on my system, so I renamed it to your_file.webp per above Python code, but I still had no idea how to run the code, but tried as follows:

I opened up a terminal (lxterminal as it happens) at folder where file your_file.webp was.

Then I ran command:

Code: Select all

python

and then I simply coped and pasted the above Python code in the terminal at the python >>> prompt. That is:

Code: Select all

from PIL import Imagepython
im = Image.open('your_file.webp')
im.save('your_file.gif', 'gif', save_all=True, optimize=True, background=0)

and, my goodness, it worked - created an animated gif file called your_file.gif from the animated your_file.webp.

I should study how python works - it is obviously pretty useful... certainly python-pillow imaging library is...

Nevertheless, nomacs viewer (per above post) doesn't need me to convert animated webp to animated gif; I can view either directly with it.

From google it seems you can install Python pillow on Ubuntu using:

Code: Select all

sudo apt install python-pil # for python 2.X
sudo apt install python3-pil # for python 3.X

With no sudo required if logged in as root user of course. I presume Ubuntu Pups therefore also have it in their PPM.

wiak

[stemsee]

vwebp viewer available for linux along with cwebp encoder and dwebp decoder.
3564 K installed!!

Found using duckduckgo search ...
https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/vwebp
linux downloads of libwebp
https://storage.googleapis.com/download ... index.html

webp-binaries.png (27.3 KiB) Viewed 2169 times

vwebphelp.png (20.66 KiB) Viewed 2167 times

[wiak]

vwebp viewer available for linux along with cwebp encoder and dwebp decoder.
3564 K installed!!

Found using duckduckgo search ...
https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/vwebp
linux downloads of libwebp
https://storage.googleapis.com/download ... index.htmlwebp-binaries.pngvwebphelp.png

Excellent! As I mentioned in earlier post, I already installed libwebp on my system to see if that magically allowed other viewers to play webp files (but didn't for me). However, I didn't realise the package came with these little utilities vwebp, cwebp and dwebp, so I already had them without knowing... vwebp does indeed work fine. Note that libwebp depends on libglut so to install in WDL_Arch64 you need:

Code: Select all

pacman -S libwebp freeglut

nomacs remains recommended by me though since so many extra facilities.