Some webp alternatives

[rich2005]

The Gimp webp plugin is very adequate. You can export your image and make animations easily although  sometimes a bit slow.  This is about some command line (CL) programs that might come in useful as alternatives.

The webp format does come from Google, their official offerings are here: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/download
The download provides utilities  cwebp: encoding tool / dwebp: decoding tool / gif2webp: gif conversion tool /  vwebp: webp viewer / webpmux: create and extract anmations   I have to confess that the only one I use regularly is the viewer, vwebp

ImageMagick v.7  (IM) supports webp. There is a page with all the details here: https://imagemagick.org/script/webp.php  Converting an image to webp is as simple as;

Code:

magick filename.ext  -quality 50 filename.webp

What is the advantage over Gimp ? Easy to batch convert with IM

Where it might come in useful is with simple animations, You can string several images together to make an animation with variable timings.

Code:

magick -delay 100  fileA.ext  -delay 200 fileB.ext -delay -delay 50 fileC.ext -quality 50 animated.webp

 

You need to experiment but a low quality settting can provide a smaller filesize than the comparible animated gif, with equal quality and no 256 colour limitations. 

A very simple example:

[rickk]

(07-15-2021, 02:59 PM)rich2005 Wrote: The Gimp webp plugin is very adequate. You can export your image and make animations easily although  sometimes a bit slow.  

Just a casual observation, but I suspect that Gimp's multi-threading deployment is still a work in progress?
I've benchmarked Gimp with gkrellm while rendering webp animations, and on an SMP machine the process isn't distributed very well across all available processors.
The load moves from processor to processor, but is not evenly distributed among them, as it is in an application such as Kdenlive while rendering an mp4 file.
I've got screen shots of both for comparison, if you are interested (although I am sure you could reproduce the same results on your own, the outcome appears to be reproducible.)