Another form of Media: Comics.

[shooty*]

I, like a lot of other people on here, I'm sure, have a collection of .CBR and .CBZ files on my computer. Those are arguably the two most common comic/ magazine formats.

At present, I use CDisplay to read them, but I've (10 minutes ago) found another app which apparently can index your comic folders and display thumbs of covers, which CDisplay cannot do.

Then it struck me: It would be simply awesome if MediaBrowser could do that. The parallels between a comic cover and a DVD cover are obvious (same basis dimension ratio, etc). Any chance of a small add on to enable comics to be displayed through it? Print is, after all, another form of media.

In my head, I picture it much the same was as the TV or movies screens: you go into "Comics", and can have subdivisions in there (X-Men, spiderman, etc) as you would with TV programs (Dexter, Buffy, etc), and then when you pick a title, you could have series, and in series, issue number.

i.e. Comics > Iron Man > V4 > 001.cbr

or whatever. And it's just struck me that you could have the "read" and "unread" tags on them. THAT would be fantastic, instead of having to try and remember which ones you'd got to...

[shooty*]

Wow, no one interested, eh?

OK, I'll do it myself.

How do you create a plug in, then?

[amitsh]

Hey Shooty,

I love comic books and got lots of cbr and cbz files.
The covers should be great to display but reading the books from a TV screen 10 feet away?
Doesn't seem practical to me but I hope I'm proven wrong.

[soultaker]

Hey Shooty,

I love comic books and got lots of cbr and cbz files.
The covers should be great to display but reading the books from a TV screen 10 feet away?
Doesn't seem practical to me but I hope I'm proven wrong.

Amitsh hit the nail on the head I don't know about you but I find reading any amount of text for a few minutes on a TV screen incredibly frustrating. Add to the fact cbr/cbz are not real fon't and so the quality could be quite horrendous.

[daavid1]

What about just allowing the user to set their own file type and external app to open them with?

[dirtymurt]

i would love to see cbr and cbz supported, after all they are simply rar or zip files, renamed containing a series of scanned images.

i can easily read my screen, granted it is a hi def projector, but this is where the future is taking us.

In my opinion, the devs should take the opportunity to add as many features as possible in as many diverse areas as possible in order to secure a broader fan base. e.g. someone starts to use it as their comic reader of choice and word quickly spreads to other readers of digital comics and a previously untapped area of the market is now using MB that would not necessarily have explored it's features (very Nintendo Wii)

by diversifying, even if the parts are not fully featured, people interested in that area in particular will follow the development and hopefully contribute and ultimately PAY for the product.

hope you agree with this viewpoint
they are kind of based on my work, where because i work for a company with many diverse markets, we have been relatively recession proof, as one part of the market folds it is not able to take us down with it. I work for a FTSE 100 with 1/2 yearly profit in excess of £600m at a time of the greatest recession in living memory.

next up, Music, Games, browser, facebook, twitter launching. Nothing flash to start with then build.

Like to see Comics next though, gotta be an easy one that and very impressive to look at with all the comics scrolling on screen....check out http://www.bitcartel.com/comicbooklover/ touted as the itunes for comics

[shooty*]

What about just allowing the user to set their own file type and external app to open them with?

SPOT ON. Sam, other devs, any chance? I just had a look at the advanced config screen, and would it be a lot of work to slot it in there?

The itunes of comics mentioned above looks awesome. But mac only. Sigh.

Just had a play around, altering some .xml files to refer to comics, and custom made metadata folder images, to see if I could get it to show covers and info: no dice.

[tikuf]

can someone post and example cbr or cbz file so i can have a peak at it

[Nate8727]

In addition to this, how about implementing an ebook type feature that you can view various ebooks like cooking, textbooks, etc...

How cool would that be to see your hundreds of books scrolling through in Cover Flow with their covers?

Allow it to view various formats like pdf, htm, etc...

[McAlpine]

I use ComicRack on my PC for comics. It also allows you to organize your collection as well as read it. It creates a .XML file inside each comics .zip archive. It also has limited PDF functionality, and if you install ghostscript it has full functionality. I use it for my comics and my PDF e-books. I've always wanted a way to use this program on Media Center. I'd love to be able to do this with Mediabrowser.