I am testing out the ComiXed platform for managing my comics and acting as an OPDS server. It is quite similar to Komga and Kavita (which I’ve also been testing). They all have their pros and cons, not sure which I’m going to go with yet.
I have added some comics to ComiXed and the OPDS server is hosting them just fine. I can get them to display inside other apps which support viewing/pulling from OPDS feeds. Panels, however, thinks it is empty. Panels can connect to the feed no problem, but it displays it as blank, while other apps do not.
I’m guessing this is an OPDS protocol implementation issue, but not sure whether its a Panels issue or a ComiXed one (or a little of both?). I’m guessing Panels at the moment because the feed works with other apps.
Anyone have any ideas/recommendations? Devs, if you monitor this, anything I can do to submit a bug report? Thanks!
Thanks for calling this out. I’ll give ComiXed a look and see what’s going on.
We validate our feed parser with the OPDS 1.2 specs. When an OPDS feed doesn’t work is normally because a required field is missing or not conforming to the specs.
But I’ll try to reproduce what you are describing and see if there’s anything we can do on our side.
I’ve looked into this and there are a couple of issues. Some of them we can fix, and some others need to be fixed on the ComiXed side.
The first issues is that they are defining the different sub-feed linked with the rel value start and we were expecting it to be subsection. This was causing the sub-feeds (folders) to not appear on Panels. The specs allow both so I’ve added start to our parser and now we can show the ComiXed sub-feeds.
They are not returning the thumbnail relationship for individual comics, but image. It’s not entirely correct because image is expected to be a full resolution image and thumbnail should point to a lower resolution image usable when listing the items. I’ve done some changes in the app to use the image instead of thumbnail when it is not present. This should make the files appear in Panels and show their thumbnail artwork. Unfortunately, the image I’m getting from the OPDS feed is an empty image (0 bytes).
We can’t do much else here… Hopefully, they can fix it on their side.
Items identifiers are not deterministic. This means that every time we fetch the feed, the comics identifiers change. This is problematic because we use the comic identifier to store the cache of the comic. If you tap on the comic, Panels downloads it and stores it locally. The next time you visit that same series, the comic appears as not downloaded, and you have to download it again to read it.
According to the Atom RFC RFC 4287 - The Atom Syndication Format
The “atom:id” element conveys a permanent, universally unique
identifier for an entry or feed.
We have added a special rule for ComiXed on our end, so it works. It’s not ideal… but it’s probably faster than requesting a fix.
Bottom line: Everything should work now, except for the covers. That hopefully, is something they can fix easily.
These changes will be included in the next release.
Thanks for checking this out, and for the detailed response. Would you recommend opening an issue on the ComiXed git repo, linking to your comment? I checked, and it looked like there were no issues open that mention anything specifically like what you outlined. If so, I’ll open in when I get the chance, maybe get both ends of this worked out. Thanks!
I think that the empty image issue is worth opening an issue on their repo. Yes
Feel free to link this thread in case someone in the ComiXed team wants to ask for more information or whatever.
We collaborate with Komga and Kavita, already. I’m more than happy to collaborate with them to smooth the integration out and make the experience better for our users.
