[feature request] please support a pallete cycling format about gnome-wallpaper-changer

[Ghostkeeper]

You mean, to create/use a file format of animated images, where the pixel values don't change, but they refer to a palette where the colours of the palette change over time?

GIF indeed kind of allows that, but the rendering will have to re-render the whole image indeed.

Some other animated image file types are:

• APNG, which swaps out the whole pixel data every frame in the file format. And its older cousin MNG.
• WebP, not a palette-based format.
• All the "real" movie formats like HEVC, VP9, etc are also not palette-based.
• Aseprite, which is similar to GIF but doesn't support per-frame palettes.

The way that it works with GIF is that GIF can define a (local) palette per frame, and then have an identical frame of pixel data. So the identical frame there probably compresses fairly well even with GIF's limited RLE, but still requires re-interpreting and re-rendering of all of it.

So the way I see it, you'd either do this with GIF (which should already work in Gnome), or you'd create a whole new file format that allows this.

I think creating a whole new file format is out of scope for this plug-in. And frankly, creating a new algorithm for how images are rendered in your desktop background also. This extension merely swaps out the image link in the org.gnome.desktop.background Gnome preference at the moment. Any rendering algorithm I'd make with GJS would probably be less efficient than just using a GIF. Sorry!

[i30817]

So the way I see it, you'd either do this with GIF (which should already work in Gnome), or you'd create a whole new file format that allows this.

So, i tried this extension with gifs now, and the image stays static. Did you mean i was supposed to install anything else to be able to use gifs, or is this a bug?

Second, i tried to switch around the option to 'scale to monitor' and nothing seems to be happening, either in the current image or the 'next' if i force the next image. Moreover, the image appears to be scaled to the whole screen... including the space currently occupied by the topbar in gnome (not ubuntu unity).

I updated to gnome 42.2 so maybe the problem with both of these is that though.