CBZ Document Plugin (DR800S/SG)

[Kolenka]

Another little hackie.

It's a very simple CBZ viewer for the DR800. The story behind this one was that I was fed up with trying to get a good ePub conversion of my various comics, and PDF was not much better (scaling fun with the ADE renderer, plus a DR800 bug).

So instead, I wrote one up. It is based on the images plugin that iRex includes with the DR800, just tweaked to understand ZIP files. Some optimizations had to go into this just to make it work (assumptions in the images plugin lead to files being loaded multiple times when not needed), but it could be better.

Known Issues:

• Bookmarks have a bug. You can set them, but you can't unset them, and they don't appear to be set while viewing the page. I've cleaned up the code as best I can, and it still isn't clear why the page won't dog-ear. If a developer could give some insight as to what is required of the plugin to make bookmarks work correctly, it might help.
• Progressive JPEGs are slow to load (5-10 seconds, versus ~1 second of other JPEGs). Unfortunately, it's not really easy to know which is which.

Install instructions:

1. Unzip
2. Copy "Comics" to "Personal Documents" on device.
3. Run "Install Comics" from the device.
4. Enjoy.

The source is meant to build as part of the uds plugins source for 3.0 provided by iRex, under plugins.

Release Notes:

r5

• Changes to the installer. Folder can now be anywhere under "Personal Documents".
• Fix to the installer so it will actually uninstall now.
• No code changes.

r4

• Metadata is now supported. Title/Author/Publisher can be pulled from the CBZ as long as it uses the "ComicBookInfo" format introduced by ComicBookLover.
  I'm not 100% sure exactly what apps support this, but it allows attaching metadata to the CBZ file itself by using the ZIP file comment area (Docs on the format: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcs4kx8q_756xdtv7gg).

r3

• Optimizations, Optimizations, Optimizations. Loading a CBZ and rendering should be a fair amount faster now. Progressive JPEGs will still kill performance.

r2

• Fixes a couple one-off errors (d'oh) that could cause a crash, or simply render the image in the wrong place.

[badbob001]

This is awesome, thanks! I can't wait to try it. I really didn't want to convert all my manga and comics.

[madusaya]

ZIP format support it?

[Kolenka]

At least for now, ZIP is all. I wasn't going to hold off releasing this without RAR support.

Seriously, I've only had a single day to work on this, I'm surprised it even works!

[madusaya]

zip file, which copied the path do not you?
"Personal Documents" folder, copy it there's not been shown

[Kolenka]

Are you using an automatic translator? It's really hard to understand what you are asking.

It doesn't catch files with a '.zip' extension, only '.cbz'

[madusaya]

thx. kolenka~
re-install works fine

[Kolenka]

I've been spending some time optimizing the plugin because I have a couple CBZs that are kinda slow to load and navigate. I found out that no matter what I do, the GDK libraries that handle image loading are slow on these types of files.

Some rules of thumb:
"Progressive" JPEGs are slow to load, on the order of 4-10x slower.
Reasonably sized PNGs and "Baseline" JPEGs are much better.

[Kessabel]

The installation was easy and it works great. I just love it.

Thanks a lot !

[Kolenka]

A quick note on CBR support:

This is probably going to be a no-go. There are two libraries available for accessing RAR files. Neither one is suitable for use in a plugin like this because either the license conflicts, and/or because it can't support very important optimizations in the plugin and will result in poor performance. I doubt anyone would use CBRs if it takes 15 seconds to load a page.

I've also been looking the remaining bottleneck in performance (progressive JPEGs), and I'm not optimistic about the results. There is some performance problem in GTK+ or libjpeg, and the answer seems to be: don't use progressive JPEGs.

Beyond that, I'm pretty happy with the performance. The next step is probably to support metadata from apps like ComicBookLover, after digging in a bit.

[Kolenka]

And with that, r4 is released.

I realize the metadata support is a little meager, but there isn't really a good standard for these sorts of files. The nice thing about this type of metadata is that you don't have to decompress/recompress the archive to add/edit the metadata.

[superhero]

Originally Posted by Kolenka

A quick note on CBR support:

This is probably going to be a no-go. There are two libraries available for accessing RAR files. Neither one is suitable for use in a plugin like this because either the license conflicts, and/or because it can't support very important optimizations in the plugin and will result in poor performance. I doubt anyone would use CBRs if it takes 15 seconds to load a page.

I've also been looking the remaining bottleneck in performance (progressive JPEGs), and I'm not optimistic about the results. There is some performance problem in GTK+ or libjpeg, and the answer seems to be: don't use progressive JPEGs.

Beyond that, I'm pretty happy with the performance. The next step is probably to support metadata from apps like ComicBookLover, after digging in a bit.

Sorry for what is probably a dumb question but can cbr files be converted into CBZ files?

If so, could you please recommend a program that can do this.

I just received my Irex today and I am greatly looking forward to trying to read some of my comics on it.

Thank you for your hard work on this.

[Kolenka]

Converting is simple:

1. Get unrar (or some version of a RAR extractor)
2. Extract cbr
3. Zip extracted files into a .zip
4. Rename .zip to .cbz
5. Done

[badbob001]

I think you mean:

Originally Posted by Kolenka

[*] Rename .zip to .cbz

I've also heard that zipping with zero compression may speed things up.

[superhero]

Originally Posted by badbob001

I think you mean:



I've also heard that zipping with zero compression may speed things up.

Thanks. Now that I know how simple it is, it should be no problem. Can't wait to try it out.