Following discussions during last August’s Blender Admins meeting, the Core module team has decided to deprecate and remove the support for Big Endian Blendfiles and platforms in Blender 5.0 release.
The last Big Endian platform officially supported by Blender was the Mac PowerPC, which was discontinued in 2006. The last official release for it was Blender 2.63 in 2012. This means that this part of Blender code has been essentially unmaintained and untested for over ten years now, and that any change in affected areas, especially the file reading one, has a high chance to silently break things.
- Blender 4.5 (LTS, supported for the next 2 years) will still be able to load Big Endian-saved blendfiles, but will issue a warning when building on Big Endian platforms, and when opening such blendfiles (607e04c82e).
- Blender 5.0 will not have support for Big Endian platforms (it won’t build on them) and blendfiles, and will simply report an error when trying to open such blendfiles.
Note that Big-Endian blendfiles can be converted to Little-Endian ones by simply opening them and saving them again with any official Blender build (other than the PowerPC ones), up to and including Blender 4.5.