Fedora SilverBlue 39 heic problem

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1

Hi,

I have problem my laptop won’t show .heic pictures any longer. I get thumbnails ok in nautilus, but no-other sw can open them. On F38 time this still worked. I have these additional packages installed, what I might be missing?

         LayeredPackages: ffmpeg-free gnome-tweaks gstreamer1-vaapi heif-pixbuf-loader intel-gpu-tools langpacks-en langpacks-fi
                          libavcodec-freeworld libheif-tools libva-utils nextcloud-client qemu-kvm qt-heif-image-plugin tmux
                          virt-install virt-manager virt-viewer wireguard-tools zsh
           LocalPackages: libheif-freeworld-1.17.5-1.fc39.x86_64 rpmfusion-free-release-39-0.2.noarch
                          rpmfusion-nonfree-release-39-0.2.noarch

For some reason rpmfusion repos are missing the latest libheif-freeworld, so I had to install it locally by pointing rpm-ostree to koji.

But still, in F38 this set of packages made it work. Now none of the pic applications (flatpak) nor the system installed ones like firefox can show them. Which is bit of a problem, as my mobile takes pics in such format.

$ rpm -qa '*heif*' 
libheif-1.17.5-1.fc39.x86_64
libheif-freeworld-1.17.5-1.fc39.x86_64
qt-heif-image-plugin-0.3.4-1.fc39.x86_64
libheif-tools-1.17.5-1.fc39.x86_64
heif-pixbuf-loader-1.17.5-1.fc39.x86_64
2

Linking to tracking bug: add support for heic images · Issue #505 · fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker · GitHub

3

Thanks, that’s an issue I made a while back, hasn’t caught attention. I realized now that if I remove all flatpaks installed from fedora repo, and reinstall them (gimp, darktable, eye of gnome…) from flathub, they do work. But firefox coming from fedora silverblue won’t work even with the above rpms installed. It used to work in f38. I can’t now find a thread, but while I DDG’d this today, I run into thread where someone complained he had to downgrade libheif* as some newer libheif stuff made it not work in fedora.

Any insights from anyone who got it working are very welcome :slight_smile:

4

As I mentioned in that issue, Firefox doesn’t seem to support heif on any platform, nor does any other browser outside Safari:

I’m not an expert on Firefox internals, but I don’t know how it could have worked on F38. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t use arbitrary GdkPixbuf loaders for web content.

What is it that you’re viewing in Firefox? Nextcloud? Maybe it was previously converting the files to a better-supported format for display.

1 Like
5

You are right, I was unclear and likely wrong. I just remember being able to handle .heic images in F38 in general, and now I could not at all. I don’t actually remember if FF showed them or not, perhaps it never did. I DDG’d around, and seems like you said, browsers don’t really often support .heic. I also tried ungoogled chromium from flathub, it didn’t show heics either.

So now everything but browser works. Just need to find a browser that supports .heic. Odd that they don’t, I recall .heic is free to show. I recall it’s Nokia developed and patented, but free for viewing images.

6

HEIF is based on H.265 (HEVC) in the same way that AVIF is based on AV1. Thus it has the same onerous and muddled patent licensing situation as H.265 itself, and no one other than Apple wants any part of it.

Nokia apparently includes a patent grant with their implementation, but it’s restricted to non-commercial use and it excludes all codec patents, so it’s pretty much worthless.

7

I have those layered libheif-freeworld libheif-tools for 3 different photos software could work with HEIC format without problems. I use PhotoPrism, PhotoStructure and ShotWell.