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generic "Unspecified" error when heif-plugin bridge package missing (libheif-plugin-libde265)Â #1876
Description
I'm not sure if this is the right place to file this issue, since it relates to .deb packaging, but I attempted to decode an image and received:
% heif-convert in.heic out.jpg
File contains 1 image
decoding image... 100%
Could not decode image: Decoder plugin generated an error: Unspecified
The problem was that although I had the libde265-0 package installed, I was missing libheif-plugin-libde265. Missing_plugin would have been better, though it'd be really great to have something that explained the situation. (IIUC, it'd be something like "you're trying to decode HEVC and I have a plugin for that, but that plugin failed because it's missing the bridge"? I'm parroting an AI's description, I don't actually understand how libheif or bridge plugins work.)
Activity
torusrxxx commentedon Jul 22, 2026
If there is no
libde265plugin, how doeslibheifknowlibde265exists without going through the plugin?Probably the better error message is "No decoder plugin installed for HEVC".
idallen commentedon Aug 12, 2026
I just hit this problem on a fresh install of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
I ran:
apt install libheif-examplesI got the "Unspecified" error when trying to convert HEIC images.
I had to run:
apt install libheif-plugin-libde265return the tile decoding error when no grid tile could be decoded (#1876
name the compression format and an example decoder plugin in the missâĶ
add regression tests for grid images where all tiles fail to decode (#âĶ
farindk commentedon Aug 31, 2026
Thanks for the report. The library actually generated a meaningful error in the past, but because of #1448, we were ignoring errors during tile decoding. Since a missing plugin is also such an error, these errors were all ignored and replaced with a very unspecific one when no tiles decoded at all.
The above commit now returns the more specific error when no tiles did decode.