Distant Cbz/cbr thumbnails when using SMB

Hi,

I have a Synology NAS and the SMB import is a big plus for me.
Question: when browsing files thru SMB, is it possible to see the cbz/cbr thumnails or just the files list?

Regards,
Rafael

Unfortunately, this is not possible. In order to show the thumbnail, we would have to download the file first to extract it. We can only show them when accessing OPDS services because they serve the thumbnail.

Thank you for your reply.
I have a developer background myself (but never on IOS/Android :frowning:)
I’ve came something that could be of interest : GitHub - LeversonCarlos/HttpZipStream: Library to extract specific entries from a remote http zip archive without downloading the entire file
“Library to extract specific entries from a remote http zip archive without downloading the entire file”

Is a similar approach would be possible + use a local cache to store avoid doing it for already handled files would great.

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Thank you so much for the link. It’s quite interesting. :ok_hand:

This is a quite challenging problem to solve, and surely we have spent quite a lot of time thinking about how to solve it.

Unfortunately, we can’t implement a solution like that at the moment. We don’t implement the SMB connections ourselves. We use a third-party open-source library GitHub - amosavian/AMSMB2: Swift framework to connect SMB2/3 shares. We only have access to high-level APIs.
We don’t consider the option of forking/proposing changes to AMSMB2 because it’s out of our scope at this moment.
Additionally, it would only solve the problem for SMB users, but we would still have the same problem on the GoogleDrive, Dropbox, OneDrive, … integrations.
Also, we support cbz, cbr, and pdf. In the future, we are planning to add e-pub. I’m unsure whether this approach would work with all the supported formats.

That’s why our recommendation is to use services like Komga/Kavita/Ubooquity to serve your comics library.

I totally understand the frustration, but trying to solve this problem from the client side would be a very expensive project for a very small benefit (considering the small number of users using SMB on Panels requesting this feature).

I hope it makes sense :pray:

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I’m curious- what’s driving the thought around epubs? Is there a use case for comic book epubs?

Sure i totally understand,

Thank you for you detailed awnser!
I’ll give a try at Komga/Kavita/Ubooquity a suggested.

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Indeed. Some publishers edit comics in epub format. Humble Bundle for instance.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think Humble Bundle has used epub for quite a while for comics. They mostly used PDFs, and sometimes CBR/CBZ. If I’m wrong, I apologize.

There’s no need to apologize, but yeah, they still release comic/manga in epub (amongst other formats) Humble Manga Bundle: Award-Winning Manga 2022 by Kodansha Comics (pay what you want and help charity)

DrivethruComics also distribute some publications in epub. Rogue: Untouched - Aconyte Books | Marvel: Heroines | DriveThruComics.com

I stand corrected, as Prince used to sing!

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