Failing to import cover from most CBR

[snipe2004]

Hi guys,

I use Calibre for a while to store my comic books. That means I use three kinf of files : PDF, CBR and CBZ. I never had a problem with that.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10, and then imported new comic books into Calibre. From this time, almost all CBR files didn't receive a cover.
I saw that it was supposed to be fixed in 2011, and some workarounds such as "bulk editing" and asking Calibre to get the cover from the file didn't work.

I'm quite stuck... I started downloading covers from Internet, but 1) I don't want to do this by hand for 600+ comic books and 2) a lot of covers aren't even found on the Internet.

I was wondering about a dependency missing, but I got unrar, rar and p7zip-full installed. I didn't change anything in the preferences of Calibre at first, then I went to have a look if some plugin were disabled or whatever, but nothing. By the way, I can perfectly read those files using evince, as usual.

When trying to import manually the cover from file in "simple edit mode", I get the following message : "impossible to read the cover from CBR format".

Of course, I use the latest version of Calibre.
At first, I see two points of difference between "before, CBR cover ok" and "now, CBR cover ko" : I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 and in the same time upgraded to the latest Calibre, coming from a version a bit older.

Any idea ?

[BetterRed]

@snipe2004 - Did you try going back to the version of calibre you were previously using. That might narrow the problem down to ubuntu or calibre. I'm assuming its easier for you to downgrade calibre than it would be ubuntu.

BR

[kovidgoyal]

Run

ebook-meta --get-cover cover.jg file.cbr

in a terminal, that should tell you what the problem is.

[snipe2004]

Hi and thanks for your help.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/customize/ui.py", line 334, in get_file_type_metadata
mi = plugin.get_metadata(stream, ftype.lower().strip())
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/customize/builtins.py", line 153, in get_metadata
ret = extract_first(stream)
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/utils/unrar.py", line 187, in extract_first_alphabetically
names_ = [x for x in names(stream) if os.path.splitext(x)[1][1:].lower() in
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/utils/unrar.py", line 154, in names
f = RARFile(stream)
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/utils/unrar.py", line 92, in RARFile
%err)
RuntimeError: Failed to load unrar module with error: No module named unrar

But unrar is there... If I do a :

unrar e file.cbr

, I got all the jpg...

[eschwartz]

Are you by any chance running the version from the software center?

The latest version is 1.25, but you are probably running 1.0.


The self-contained binaries can be found at http://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux and are pretty much guaranteed to solve the problem.

Kovid does not support the distro packages: "Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below. "

[snipe2004]

For God sake...
You're right! Sorry guys, I never installed it from my distro since so many years, and I don't know why I did so this time :/

Now, getting them one by one to check for the cover and regenerate it from file.

Thanks.
And sorry.

[BetterRed]

@snipe2004 - Assuming only CBR or CBZ, then this should work

Search cover:False - Select all books
Set Metadata Bulk Edit-Change cover->Set from ebook file radio button on
Click OK - Job done

BR

[snipe2004]

Thanks!

I could'nt do so, 'cause I had some older CBR with a customised cover.
So I simply filter my ebooks by date of the last change, displaying only cbr ones, and did it one by one - it was not that long, only ten minutes.

Thanks,

Snipe