CBR/CBZ Comic Book Parser and Reader

[JoGa]

first, sorry for my poor english, i'm french

1/ can you include a comics reader feature in xbmc ? (comics are usually in jpeg format or .zip).
many peoples download comics and other document like this on the net but currently there's no apps for this on xbox.
the "my pictures" functionnality already does a part of my request (with the slideshow feature), but here we need to display the jpeg in fullscreen (full width) and we need ability to scroll with the pad to view the rest of the jpeg (from top to bottom).
afetr we can press the a button to go to next page (it's an example)

2/ can you include a new feature to display some rss newsfeeds ?
ability to sort newsfeeds by subjects, languages, interests ...
in other way, a feature to display rss feeds of our choice, to do this sort of things.

thanks in advance for your answer(s)
i'm already a huge fan of xbmp since the first day and i wish you success for this new baby.

( please send me an email if you didn't understand anything with my questions :d )

[nimbles]

ok if i explain what i tried maybe it'd be easier.

in my music i wanted to put a "my radio stations sub category" which contained a link to shoutcast .pls files i'd saved on my xbox, and a samba share link to the streams i had shared on my pc (which tends to get updated more regularly). however when i tried to do this- it wouldn't work this is what i tried:

<music>
.
.
<bookmark>
<name>internet radio</name>
<bookmark>
<name>xbmc stored radio stations</name>
<path>$home\radio</path>
</bookmark>

<bookmark>
<name>my radio stations (on pc)</name>
<path>smb://my-computer/radio</path>
</bookmark>

</bookmark>
.
</music>

secondly, i dunno if many people would actually require this but i get quite a lot of comics (amazing spiderman and fantastic four) which are archived as .cbz and .cbr files (essentially they a rar'ed files with the extensions renamed so they can be associated with the awesome cdisplay program).

it would be nice if i could use xbmc to read them in there compressed format, although this may be a bit too much to expect even from you guys :d

[Frodo]

again xbmc is a media centre, not an os with all programs you personnaly like/want
main purpose for xbmc is playing audio/video files and viewing your (vacation) photo's

reading text/comics or whatever is not going 2 b part of xbmc
neither are the following items which get requested over and over again:

- web-browser ala mozilla/firebird
- email reader ala outlook (express)
- msn or any other messenger program
- personal agenda/pim
-

we just got 64 megs so we gotta be picky what we want and dont want. at the moment there's not much left, xbmc is already getting bloated with 2 many options or features

frodo

[nimbles]

yeah i thought it was a bit of a long shot, although the premise of being able to view jpegs that are conatined in a rar file, may have some use other than for comic books?

[^MAX^]

please add comics support to xbmc, current comic format uses rar or zip as container and jpeg as pages. most are : .cbr (.rar renamed) and .cbz (.zip renamed), there is a good example of comic reader here:
http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/cdisplay

i could code a unrar and unzip warper for xbmc if someone does some gui.

thanks
max

[tslayer]

please check the development forum. somebody was porting unrar to the xbox but never completed it seems. would be great if you could do so.

ts

[^MAX^]

i already coded a xbox version of unrar (complex tools), it's only matter of integrate it into xbmc.
i'll look into.
since i don't know the xbmc architecture yet. pointing fingers welcomed.
support for zip should by trivial also.
problem is: *rar could be solid, which mean, for subtitles and small stuff, is allright since they're small.
but for big rar files, some kind of temporary space should be used.

[jmarshall]

z: is the xbox temporary drive for caching stuff.

[^MAX^]

z:\ maybe to small, i think is only 768mb. my first tought was implement it like a directory, but if xbmc want to stream from the rar some other method should be implemented. some kind of special cases should be made. examples like, if you want to stream an avi, seek should be disabled. maybe some preferences like, filesystem_seekable=false;.

[Amything]

here is a python comic reader, might be helpful (it's not ported on xbox) http://kai.vm.bytemark.co.uk/~piman/superchick/