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Old 15th August 2021, 07:34   #1749  |  Link
danlock
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Join Date: Oct 2017
Posts: 15

Quote:
Originally Posted by LoRd_MuldeR View Post
Not currently planned.
Understandable. Thank you again!

Quote:
There are many open questions regarding WebP:
  1. Does Qt support the WebP format? I think Qt 4, which LameXP is currently based on, does not. Probably current Qt 5 does. But then, porting LameXP to Qt 5 will be a big project for the future
  2. Do the various audio formats that we support in LameXP support the WebP format in their meta data? For example, MP3 embeds meta data in the form of ID3 tags. And, to the best of my knowledge, ID3v2 "officially" only supports JPEG and PNG. Which is obvious, because at the time that ID3v2 was created WebP didn't even exist! And that's only MP3. What about all the other formats?
  3. Even if some of the audio formats that we support actually do support WebP in their meta data, do the encoders that we use support WebP as input? What do we do with the other formats?
Foobar 2000 can read .webp files in metadata (and add or remove .webp files as metadata). That was first implemented by pointing Fb2k to an external file, and later added internally (September 2000). That's a program which was coded from the ground up to support plugins and other features, though, and Peter can alter his code base or plugins to add/remove support for different things anytime. It's possible other players/encoders can read .webp metadata as well, but I can't think of any. I presumed any other relatively-decent player would discard the .webp image data as extraneous. A poorly-coded player, on the other hand, would see the "extra" data and crash or claim the file is bad, but (come to think of it) since metadata exists as a separate, resizable part of the file (whether as part of the audio file or in an external tag file), it probably just wouldn't be displayed.
As small as lossy .webp (and the next version, .webp2) files are compared to most other image formats with similar quality, it's a space savings to use .webp format in audio files (lossless .webp files obviously don't compress as much). For maximum compatibility and even more space, I should probably just use an external image in the directory and put only textual metadata in the files.
Support in QT seems to be the biggest hurdle. I had not considered that. Thanks for reminding me of LameXP's usage of QT!

Well, for the purposes of this forum and LameXP, the future is approaching at a fixed speed. End users like me will probably learn of support for any new formats whenever any porting to a newer version of QT occurs, since the tagging is typically handled by the external components for which LameXP provides the interface. And those decoder/encoder combinations that don't support .webp would output a file that doesn't contain the image, of course, like they already do.

Something will change when those included external decoders work for newer metadata or LameXP itself can copy metadata in (.webp/etc.) whatever formats are present in the file, in the future, whenever it happens.

Speaking of time, I've allowed far too much of it to march past me while I typed this message! (Muss los!)

Last edited by danlock; 23rd August 2021 at 22:18. Reason: minor details, reducing ambiguity (hopefully)
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