WebP Support

[ajc2]

It seems like WebP is going to be the format of the future, since it outperforms PNG for the same result, so omitting it from maim is a bit unfortunate. Client support is pretty wide, but I'm not really sure how many open libraries there are for it. Is that why?

[naelstrof]

It should be pretty easy to implement, I haven't touched maim in quite a while though since Wayland was trying to supersede and eliminate all existing screenshot apps due to security reasons.

That was a couple years ago, and now it seems like they've added a form of implicit authentication with "Portals". Described here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/issues/32

It still requires a lot of work on my end, but if I can get it to work the way I expect I'll definitely add WebP support.

[llenck]

I think this can be closed now.

[foxpy]

Resolved by #233.

[L1pE]

I can't get webp images to paste through xclip as per the example in the readme (while replacing mimetype and even adding --format=webp). Could it be on xclip's side?

[foxpy]

I can't get webp images to paste through xclip as per the example in the readme (while replacing mimetype and even adding --format=webp). Could it be on xclip's side?

First of all, maim generates perfect webp at least on my machine. You can easily validate it for yourself:

$ maim --format=webp | file -
/dev/stdin: RIFF (little-endian) data, Web/P image, VP8 encoding, 1366x768, Scaling: [none]x[none], YUV color, decoders should clamp

When I pipe webp image into xclip like this: maim --format=webp | xclip -selection clipboard -t image/webp, things get funny. Telegram Desktop apparently decodes whatever you paste into it and manually encodes into jpeg or png. At least it understands the webp part and decodes it as expected. Firefox apparently does not understand/support image/webp MIME type in its clipboard API and pastes whole image as plain text. Haven't tested other applications but this thing seems to be working well on my machine © ® ™, only applications support for webp is limited.

xclip seems to be working well, too. You can validate xclip like this:

$ maim --format=webp | xclip -selection clipboard -t image/webp
$ xclip -o -selection clipboard | file -
/dev/stdin: RIFF (little-endian) data, Web/P image, VP8 encoding, 1366x768, Scaling: [none]x[none], YUV color, decoders should clamp

[L1pE]

I see, my bad, had only tested one program (Wire chat) and I knew it accepted webp images so I didn't expect it to choke on the mimetype, which it does by not reacting in any way to paste attempts. But I can confirm my xclip output looks similar to yours and it also pastes on e.g. GIMP with no problems. Thanks for the info.

[foxpy]

I see, my bad, had only tested one program (Wire chat) and I knew it accepted webp images so I didn't expect it to choke on the mimetype, which it does by not reacting in any way to paste attempts. But I can confirm my xclip output looks similar to yours and it also pastes on e.g. GIMP with no problems. Thanks for the info.

Yeah, webp is still relatively new (even though it is based on old VP8 video codec!) and most software is not prepared to encounter webp images.