Support other animated wallpaper formats

[nametable]

It seems like most places that provide animated wallpapers are providing mp4 downloads rather than gif. Is it feasible to add support for mp4/webm/etc?

Or is there a performance reason for using gif, in which case the best solution would be to convert mp4/webm to gif?

[LGFae]

Decoding mp4 would increase our dependencies significantly. Maybe I will be able to do something about it by changing from the image crate to a system dependency on ffmpeg. That would let us support mp4, but it would take a while for me to implement, I believe.

[nonetrix]

Also it uses CPU currently to my understanding as well, so GPU decoding would be ideal for cards that actually support it well unlike mine (thanks AMD real cool)

[LGFae]

I mean, we only decode once, in the client (we read all frames at once). If we were to support entire videos, then yeah, we would probably need the GPU to do stream decoding, but that would never be the goal (there's mpvpaper for that). Even if we were to support mp4, it would only be for small short videos, if anything.

Right now, the best way to use animated wallpapers would be gifs that don't change a lot. This was on purpose, since those are the type of images I believe work best as wallpapers. I have no intention of having great support for absolutely any kind of video, since that would be very hard (because we wouldn't be able to read all frames of a long video at once -- too much memory usage) and increase our dependencies.

So I don't think CPU decoding is a problem; swww doesn't really have to be that fast at decoding.

[KAGEYAM4]

@LGFae Do you have some automation setup for -> getting wallpapers/gifs > rotating through them > deleting old ones > loop

Any resource you can point for gifs?

[NaiveInvestigator]

I have found this awesome tool which converts mp4s into gifs fairly well! It is not a solution but atleast it works for now:
https://github.com/ImageOptim/gifski

Do you have some automation setup for -> getting wallpapers/gifs > rotating through them > deleting old ones > loop

I dont have anything that complex, but i do have a simple script which just cycles randomly in my wallpaper dir

#!/bin/bash

# Get a random file from ~/Pictures
random_file=$(find ~/Pictures -type f -follow | shuf -n 1)

# Check if a file was selected
if [[ -z "$random_file" ]]; then
    echo "No files found in ~/Pictures directory"
    exit 0
fi

# Execute swww with the random file
swww img "$random_file"

[KAGEYAM4]

I have found this awesome tool which converts mp4s into gifs fairly well! It is not a solution but atleast it works for now: https://github.com/ImageOptim/gifski

Do you have some automation setup for -> getting wallpapers/gifs > rotating through them > deleting old ones > loop

I dont have anything that complex, but i do have a simple script which just cycles randomly in my wallpaper dir

#!/bin/bash

# Get a random file from ~/Pictures
random_file=$(find ~/Pictures -type f -follow | shuf -n 1)

# Check if a file was selected
if [[ -z "$random_file" ]]; then
    echo "No files found in ~/Pictures directory"
    exit 0
fi

# Execute swww with the random file
swww img "$random_file"

anything for automating gettings images/videos/gifs ( mostly gifs )