HEIF/HEIC decoder fails with iPhone 16 Pro

danphil51 · August 8, 2025 at 1:14 AM

Apparently Apple has made some changes to their HEIC format. Until I recently upgraded my phone I could decode and see all images. HEIC images from my wife's iPhone 12 decode and display properly. Images from my iPhone 16 are totally black. I am running LibreElec 12.0.2 on a RPi4.aarch64 (raspberry pi 4B+ 8G Mem )

Kodi.log shows:

2025-08-07 17:44:11.360 T:2171 error <general>: AddOnLog: imagedecoder.heif: LoadImageFromMemory: Read error 'Invalid input: Unspecified: Metadata not correctly assigned to image'
2025-08-07 17:44:11.363 T:2170 info <general>: Skipped 1 duplicate messages..
2025-08-07 17:44:11.363 T:2170 info <general>: ADDON: Dll Destroyed - HEIF image decoder

I was able to resolve this issue on my AMD64 Linux Box (Ubuntu 24.04) by updating libheif from ppa:strukturag/libheif to version 1.19.8-1

Current LibreElec installed version:

/var/media/root64/usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libheif.so.1.15.1

Is it possible to update to a newer version now, or is the new version scheduled for release soon?

Thanks

Dan

**chewitt** · August 8, 2025 at 10:24 AM

It's been reported upstream: https://github.com/xbmc/imagedecoder.heif/issues/76 .. but that doesn't appear to have gotten anyone's attention. If/when/once Kodi bump the add-on we'll pick up the change.

**mglae** · August 8, 2025 at 1:52 PM

chewitt We are already at libheif 1.20.1 on master but 1.17.6 on iibreelec-12.x

**heitbaum** · August 8, 2025 at 3:01 PM

12.2 has the “latest”. There is a further libheif update that will go into master and 12.2 over the next few days. Not sure if this addresses the issue.

danphil51 · August 8, 2025 at 8:59 PM

Thank you everyone. If we are only talking about a few days (per heitbaum) I'll just wait it out. Sounds like my minor "problem" will be resolved soon.

As always I appreciate your efforts providing excellent/fun software