Add support for the HEIF image file format

[coolinx]

Currently in the build 94ddfd0 from August the High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) with file extentions .HEIC is not supported. The package heif-gdk-pixbuf can be used to display heic files on a RPI with OS version bullseye.

[Geektoolkit]

Since we're not on Bullseye, some of the work here would be to try to get things moved up to bullseye, or to provide some kind of proxy cache conversion methods to on the fly convert HEIC and cache images onto local storage. Pro/cons:

Moving to bullseye

• May get new features with Mutter compositor
• On a more modern debian with better support (such as HEIC)
• Possability to natively support this
• Users would have to 'clean install' to update their images (vs. using store support)
• Verification, porting, and testing to get to the new image is time consuming and expensive

Proxy cache method

• Could be shipped via store method (no losing of settings, would just be an added feature
• Needed to support other file formats such as TIFF in the future
• Provides a performant way of handling of larger files
• Takes a cache hit sizewise
• More writing of the sd card and slower image importing to create the cache file

Thankyou for filing this, we'll keep it on the backlog to look into. Looking at moving forward OS wise is important so it's good to have this.

[coolinx]

I would like to add a pro for moving to bullseye and a con to the proxy cache method:

Pro Bullseye comes with a new video driver; Raspberry moves from a closed source video driver to a more standard linux video driver. So the development efforts you currently do on the display side of DynaFrame you perhaps could re-use when porting DynaFrame to a different Linux OS.

Con Converting heic files to jpeg would make it difficult to extract and retain the exif information to display the location or 'date taken' info.

Not sure if you could use this to upgrade existing DynaFrame installations instead of providing an image: sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Personally I would not mind re-flashing a new OS. Maybe an export/import of settings feature could help users here.

[Geektoolkit]

That all makes sense and are good things to think about. A settings import would be useful for a number of scenarios for sure.

I'm going to try to update using the dust-update method and see how things look. Sometimes the first step is just to info gather and see. We have another big I'd love to get fixed related to the infobar and VLC covering it up, so I'll see id mutter helps there as well.

[coolinx]

I'm going to try to update using the dust-update method and see how things look. Sometimes the first step is just to info gather and see. We have another big I'd love to get fixed related to the infobar and VLC covering it up, so I'll see id mutter helps there as well.

I found this dist-upgrade instructions here but have no experience with it myself. https://djangocas.dev/blog/upgrade-existing-jessie-to-buster-without-re-image/#continue-upgrade-to-bullseye

[Geektoolkit]

Some updates here...we're currently having problems getting the video to correctly rotate, and we're seeing rendering issues on Bullseye. We're going to investigate them, but until we can get them sorted it blocks us from moving up currently. We're working on it however.

[joekeslar]

This thread appears to be quite old, and apologies if it's been answered elsewhere, but is HEIC/HEIF supported in the latest build as of Sept. 2023? I'd join the Patreon if it does, but cannot find anywhere to get confirmation or otherwise post the question...

[bdlou]

This thread appears to be quite old, and apologies if it's been answered elsewhere, but is HEIC/HEIF supported in the latest build as of Sept. 2023? I'd join the Patreon if it does, but cannot find anywhere to get confirmation or otherwise post the question...

We added limited support for this in a previous release. When you use the web interface to upload your photos to Dynaframe, we convert them to jpg files. We cannot do direct displaying of these file formats without conversion.