Quote:
Originally Posted by micster
Could you expand on what issues exist when creating a general OPDS browser? I have seen several requests for this feature in either a plugin or built into the native functionality of Calibre, but no explanation on what is holding it up.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DoctorOhh
That said, I can see arguments against adding a general OPDS browser to CC, but I would love to hear the challenges involved in possibly adding this item to CC.
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First, and agreeing with DoctorOhh, adding a general OPDS client to CC is not the same thing as adding one to calibre. A calibre-based client should be its own discussion.
As for extending CC's browser, the issues are mostly related to metadata and user experience. If we limit ourselves to calibre's content server, then we can guarantee that we have the metadata to do book matching (on-device), format matching (extensions), and to display book metadata details. Non-calibre OPDS servers don't supply the UUID to do matching and don't supply the path information to do format replacement. Finally, the metadata supplied is not consistent and is not in any way complete, complicating the wireless connection side of CC's house. We decided that we would rather focus on excellent calibre integration at the expense of generality.
Of course we could build a general client, but for the reasons given above it would not offer the same functionality. This would be confusing for our users. As there are other ways to accomplish the same thing, for example FBReader's OPDS client, that integrate well enough with CC's book-scan-on-connect, we aren't in a hurry to open this door.