[Feature Request]: Support for animated webp format file images...

[murrayf]

Congrats for Conky... It supports webp format for static images, but recently has been developed image to video AI models that export the results as webp format animated images (through Comfyui software for example), and would be great to display this kind of generated images through ${image /foo/image.webp ...} Conky variable...

I cannot attach here an example of that kind of files, are not supported by Github, and woul'd be great Conky to support animated gifs as well...

Anyway, Thanks and best regards,
Alberto. :)

[Caellian]

Thank you for the suggestion.

The fact that webp format is supported is just emergent from the use of imlib2 for showing images. This is likely to change at some point in future because we'll have to move away from that library to support Wayland (library is very tied to X11). At that point, we're likely going to have to manually implement support for all the different wrappers and formats unless some nice C/C++ library that handles various formats well arises.

See #1845 for developments on that front.

Then, another step is that there isn't a single line of code in conky that handles animations besides the update loop which redraws everything, something that can be used by Lua code and various other systems in future should be added - at least with enough allotment to add more complex features in future.

Lua part of the code is very stale (8+ years) with only trivial modifications done in the interim, there are some changes that are required on that front first before integrating more advanced features into Lua because just tacking it on will make a huge change that's been obvious from the code perspective for a long time much more difficult.

I do think this is a great idea, but I think a lot of pieces need to fall into place first before it can be tackled properly.

Meanwhile, you can execute system commands from Lua startup hook, run ffmpeg to convert webp into a collection of frames and then draw those using existing pre/post render hooks. It's annoying, I know, but it's doable. If you don't mind doing ffmpeg preprocessing manually (i.e. won't change the webp often), you don't need to use the startup hook. If you need help with this part, let me know.