Converting manga for DR800

[brookman]

I have just received my DR800 and want to try reading some manga on it. Now I have some questions concerning file conversion.

Which format should I use? I can imagine that plain jpg/png/bmp is not the best and fastest way. I already tried to open some images, but it's not that fast. For my old sony reader I converted them to lrf... I think for the DR800 only eReader, ePub or PDF are an option.

What is the effective display size? The screen resolution seems to be 768x1024 but some pixels are lost due to the menu bar at the bottom. What resolution should I convert my images into so that there is no need for the device to resize them? Or is there an option to hide the menu bar (fullscreen)?

Gray scales: There are 16 colors available, correct?

What software should I use to convert? For the sony reader I used a "comic2lrf" tool (for cbz files). I could also resize/dither the images with irfanview (batch) and then use some other software to pack them into a single file...

Thanks for your advice.

[lucone]

Hi, brookman.

I have DR1000, but I think that DR800 should be even faster:

I read all my manga in png formats, without any problems.
It's take a few time opening the first page, but after is almost immediate.

No problems at all!
Well.. an Enhancement very appreciated would be a fast key for rotate the screen

[brookman]

Lucone, thanks for your answer.
I have been experimenting a little and found out, that 768x980 seems to be the maximal resolution for a picture to show up without resizing. A fullscreen mode would be great not to waste 33012 pixels at the bottom...
Then I tried to convert a batch of pictures to png with irfanView. I got quite good results with the following settings:

Batch conversion:
-RESIZE: Set new size, Width 768, Height 980
-Preserve aspect ratio
-Use Resample function
-Don't enlarge smaller images
-CHANGE COLOR DEPTH: 16 Colors (Use Floyd-Steinberg dithering)
-OTHER OPTIONS: Convert to greyscale
Format: png, compression 6

Of course this doesn't crop white borders or split 2-paged images.

I put the images into a sub folder in the "Images" folder. Unfortunately the sub folder doesn't show up. Instead all images are in the root. The second problem is that switching to the next image using the side bar doesn't word. I have to exit to the images and select the next one manually.

I see, I have to do some more testing here...

[pauli]

The exact user usable size of the display is 768 by 981 pixels... Images with this size are not resized in any way

[lucone]

I don't know DR800, but it's seems a strange behaviour.

I put manga in same folder as books, in a folder with manga's name then I divided the images by chapter in subfolders.

[brookman]

Thanks for the information.
lucone: Copying a folder of images to the "image" folder or "books" folder doesn't work. It is not recognized as a collection but as single files...

Out of boredom I started to create my own simple java converter tool yesterday. It takes png/jpg/gif/cbz/zip/folders (or a mix of them), crops white borders, rotates landscape images, re-sizes the images and converts them to gray-scale pngs (256 colors). The result is quite good and fast (multi-threaded). But to further improve file size and loading speed, I would like to quantize to 16 colors. To archive this, I should know the exact native color palette of the device. Otherwise the reader might perform another dithering. Is there a detailed specification?

In a next step I should maybe convert the images to eReader, ePub or PDF. This should have a positive impact on:
- Possibility to read as a book -> Page turn will be possible
- Copy speed -> 1 file instead of 5000
- Loading speed -> No automatic thumbnail generation

I don't have too much experience with those file formats, but there seem to be a java library for epub generation.

[glymor]

Kolenka wrote a comic reader plugin that works well: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=75348

[Mr. X]

Originally Posted by pauli

The exact user usable size of the display is 768 by 981 pixels... Images with this size are not resized in any way

Is this the dimension with 0px margin and subtracting off the menu at the bottom? I'll update the calibre plugin for the 800 if so, I just put 768x1024 since I didn't have a usable window size...