[FFmpeg-devel] Status of animated WebP decoding support (ticket #4907; patches from 2024/2025)

[Osmo Hyttinen]

Hello FFmpeg developers!

Does anyone know the status of the animated WebP decoding support?
I found two independent efforts tackling this issue:

Of what I perceive as the main effort, the last thread I was able
to find from the archives was [PATCH 0/8..8/8 v13 WIP] on June 2024,
https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2024-June/330023.html

Separately, the long-standing encode-only asymmetry ticket (#4907,
opened October 2015) has in its comments a newer, simpler patch that
makes libwebp also able to decode instead of just encoding.
The latest activity of that is this [PATCH v2] on April 4th 2025:
https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2025-April/341866.html

I suspect the latter isn't being considered [directly because] of the
former, but I also remember reading a reply on some libwebp-based
approach to this, that because it would add an additional dependency
to decoding, it was highly discouraged, also leading me to believe
that the former is the more likely alternative to be used.

However, from an outsider's perspective both appear inactive.

Animated WebPs appear to be getting more and more common, and as
tons of other projects rely on FFmpeg as the back-end, they're also
"suddenly not working on a seemingly established format". FFmpeg was
the last thing I would have blamed since it has always worked for me
before, and I only found this because I use FFmpeg as the (until
this) invincible manual on-the-fly transcoder when something else
fails first. I was quite taken aback by this!

--
Osmo Hyttinen