Nomacs - viewer for webp animations
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:
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:
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nomacs --version
currently says:
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[INFO] Hi there
Image Lounge 3.17.0
which seems to be latest release.
wiak