Unable to open WebP image format

[eorus]

Is there any workaround to open webp images with vimiv?

Thanks.

[jcjgraf]

Hi @eorus!
Vimiv supports webp images. If I recall correctly, it should actually work out-of-the-box. Does it not work for all image, or just a few?
What version of vimiv are you on? While I do not think that anything has changed since the last release regarding webp, have you tried the latest version from git?
To prevent any confusion, you are using the QT version of vimiv and not the pretty much deprecated GTK version, right?

If the problem persists, please post some logs of a failed opening attempt (e.g. using vimiv --log-level debug example.webp).

[eorus]

Hi @jcjgraf ,

Thank you.. Now that I look at what you wrote, I think I've figured out the issue. However, I would like to share the details for those who will visit here later for a similar situation.

First of all, I've been using vimiv for a long time. Today I installed it directly with pacman on another machine (Archlinux). I know it's migrated to QT, but frankly, I didn't look at the version number since it was downloaded directly from community repo with several other packages. So the first problem here is that GTK with the deprecated version number "0.9.1-5" is still in the community repository.

The arch community repo should provide the "vimiv-qt 0.8.0-2" which is in active development. Otherwise, those who want to simply install vimiv like me will always go to the old version. At least for Arch :) Anyway, as a result, I installed vimiv-qt from AUR.

But after installing vimiv-qt, it still couldn't open the WebP file format I mentioned here. An additional package "qt5-imageformats" needs to be installed so that Vimiv can open WebP and perhaps other image formats. Let this be my note for the solution of the issue.

Thanks again for your quick response.

[jcjgraf]

Great that you managed to get it to work.

I am sorry for the confusion. It is indeed a bit an unsatisfying situation. And you are certainly not the first person running into this issue... See e.g. #393
It is planned that the GTK version gets fully replaced once the QT ports reaches v1.0.0. Unfortunately, we have not reached that yet, as development has staggered a bit (due to time reason).

Also, it is very likely not possible to just "replace" the vimiv version in the community repo, as Arch's TUs are responsible in deciding what is included and what not.

[karlch]

Thanks for your time and reporting! 😊

I fully agree with everything @jcjgraf has said, and unfortunately time is really the killing constraint at the moment.

In addition, I would like to mention that the AUR packages do note:

    'qt5-imageformats: for additional image formats'

do you think this message could be improved, e.g. by adding some of the formats it does support?

[karlch]

Closing as we do support webp, after #650 this is pretty clean 😊