JPEG Saver 5.47
Published
Since I added animated GIF support in the last version, I thought I should add support for other types of animated image next. So that's mostly what this version is about.
APNG but not MNG
Version 5.47 supports playing APNG files - these are PNG files with some extra data and more frames to make them animated. APNG is a bit better than animated GIF really, since PNG files support a full alpha channel and animated GIF only supports a single transparent colour.
MNG is not supported - it's another animated PNG format that never caught on, so I don't expect anyone will miss it.
Animated WebP is also supported in this version. I don't have many example images so I can't say how well it is supported, but JPEG Saver should be able to play them.
I had planned to support animated HEIF / HEIC as well, but I couldn't find any examples of that anywhere. If they start appearing on the web, I'll add support for them.
Animate more things
Playing animated GIFs, APNG and WebP files like videos is all well and good, but maybe you would like to use them as animated logos drawn on top of the screensaver. Well, I thought it would be a good idea anyway, so I did it.
The logo item now has an "Overlay / animate" option that makes JPEG Saver display the image as a real-time item, over the top of everything else. If the image is one of the animated types, then it will be animated on screen, and will also be animated in the preview panel on the item config dialog.
HDR video (and HDR in general)
Something that had been on the to-do list for a while was getting HDR videos to play properly. Until now some of my HDR test videos have been playing properly and others have just appeared as a jumbled mess. They should all play clearly now.
That doesn't mean that HDR videos will play in HDR on hardware that supports it - I don't have HDR hardware here, so I haven't attempted to support it fully. HDR videos will be downsampled to play in standard 8-bits per channel.
I downloaded an 8K HDR video from YouTube to test with that, and JPEG Saver can play it - but it's a bit slow, so I don't recommend using JPEG Saver for 8K video. I'm sure there are some decent dedicated video players that would do a much better job.
I would like to support HDR images and video properly in a future version, it will just have to wait until I have some hardware to work with.
Other bits and bobs bugs
I've added a checkbox to the video options dialog to enable a random start time for videos. It's not completely random - the video will start in the first 3/4 or up to one minute from the end, depending how long the video is. It also depends on a video that supports seeking, and some might not.
While testing that I found that some videos were not displaying a progress bar. This turned out to be because these videos didn't have a duration set in their metadata. I've fixed that by scanning through to find the actual duration of the video from the frame timestamps.
There was an obscure crash in the video frame buffer, that might have only happened because I was testing. In any case, I replaced the overly complicated code with something a lot simpler so that crash won't happen again.
Some videos were not playing, though JPEG Saver was showing the initial frame. This one confused me for a while, until I figured out that the media source was deciding quite late that it couldn't play the audio. If that happens now, JPEG Saver will disable the audio track and try to play it again.
Finally, I've added a new option to the context menu in the folders list that will allow you to rescan the folder if you think the database is out of date. The date and time of the last scan for the folder is shown in the menu, so that should help you decide.
Download link
The updated installers are available from the downloads page.