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Just started using PureRef and have been loving the functionality when working on anatomy, composition, and scenery in blender. However, I have one gripe. Even with .GIF implementation, I am unable to put embeds from YT for inspiration for animations, or videos that I record of myself to get better and more lively animations.

Again, I get that this software is supposed to be minimalist, light and for images, yet it'd be great to compare my animation with my reference recording in real time, or similarly, create rigs better for characters. You guys are a pretty small team, so I wish you luck with working on PureRef! I'm excited to see where this software goes cause it is already pretty great! :D

Thanks for putting this into consideration. :)

Thank you for the suggestion! It's a popular feature request and maybe we'll get to it some day but as you say it is a pretty big and complicated feature, especially from a performance perspective. But for the sake of discussion, how do you imagine it should work? Since by default images are embedded in the .pur files, the files would get huge if we started embedding videos as well for example.

Personally, I am not a coder so I do not have the skill set to be exact with how it may work lol, but I can try. For a .mp4 file it could maybe use a H.264 decoder to open a video, and then it could apply the video onto a blank image that is the same size as the video, so it can be scaled, moved and or rotated similarly to an image, but the video would be on-top of the blank image. (Assuming all images are imported the same way) Besides that, videos could be looped or just played once, maybe even played backwards if you're able to do that.

YouTube luckily has a built in "Embed" option when the "Share" button is pressed, so here's my embed:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZnuwB35GYMY?si=xGGVbWLRORXK_U3j" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I am unsure if PureRef runs off HTML or not but if so this could be pretty handy, again, this feature could work similarly to how images can be easily manipulated, but maybe not rotated and would be forced to stay at the same proportions.

When it comes to compressing videos / embeds, it could draw the videos of the drive of the computer instead of saving them in the file so it could search for the path to the .mp4 itself and decompress it as the save is being loaded. The same could go for embeds, where it could save the link, and then draw the file from it with the saved scale / position of the embed.

Again I am not much of a coder and I don't have an idea of the difficulty of it all, just a thought, but I really appreciate how responsive and community oriented you and your team are! Best of luck! :D

For remote videos like YouTube it probably makes sense to just store a link to it by default, but for local video files it might need to be very clear that they get linked since it makes it hard to move/share the .pur file. Thanks for your feedback, we'll keep it in mind when/if we get to implement the feature :)