@AsphyxNYC said:
Yes Bart it is a media server…a STREAMING MEDIA server…
Not a file server which requires little to zero server resources other than sharing a folder.
Pruit no it really doesn’t have what it needs to do things such as read books (there is no book reader in Plex Apps.) and it has no database that can log what was the last page you read and be able to do that for MULTIPLE users which Plex is meant to serve.
To both - There is a HUGE difference between what a media server does and what a personal cloud is meant to do.
Plex is not a personal cloud server…Cloud servers are nothing more than simple file servers that allow you to download files locally and use them.
Plex is meant to never have to send the entire file (Sync allows this) but to send you a stream of the file you want as to not take up local storage…
Big Big difference IMO…
(excuse me in advance for my English)
Why peoples use Plex?
Above all, Plex is done to facilitate people’s lives and provide comfort. So why stop this process by forcing people to multiply solutions (and constraints) to read books and others files ? Apart from legal or financial constraints, I do not see what can brake !
@johnson.patrickw said:
Both audiobooks and comics are absolutely streamable.
What bitrate does your average comic stream at?
It gets downloaded not streamed!
It sends the ENTIRE FILE!
Not just parts of it as you go along.
What you want is a file server not a streaming server!
And yes Pictures are not streamable but they also take up a ton more storage space than your average EBook or Comic does.
@pruitt62 said:
Plex already has nearly everything it needs to be a simple eComic viewer.
You then go onto to say EXCEPT the viewer!
Which is pretty much the key component isn’t it?
Point I’m making is there are dozens of EComic viewers that would work and don’t require Plex as any simple file server can do.
Plex is not meant to be a personal cloud…
@Guillaume Small said:
Above all, Plex is done to facilitate people’s lives and provide comfort. So why stop this process by forcing people to multiply solutions (and constraints) to read books and others files ? Apart from legal or financial constraints, I do not see what can brake !
Where do we stop though?
Should Plex also collect and send us our Email? Should it also log and record all of our bookmarks as well?
Do we also use it to store all of our Documents too?
Isn’t that already available as a personal cloud?
Plex is an app it isn’t an operating system or cloud service…
There are far better ways to do that.
Like some others on this thread, I use ubooquity to stream comics. It
doesn’t send the whole comic file, it just sends one page at a time. Very
efficient!
I’m not sure why people are so against this request, media files certainly
include digital books, audiobooks, and comics. And plex is definitely a
media player! Seems like a perfect fit for those of us that use plex on our
portable devices.
@AsphyxNYC said:
Where do we stop though?
Should Plex also collect and send us our Email? Should it also log and record all of our bookmarks as well?
Do we also use it to store all of our Documents too?
Isn’t that already available as a personal cloud?
Plex is an app it isn’t an operating system or cloud service…
There are far better ways to do that.
Why we use Plex?
'Cause Plex is the answer to a need. No becaufe Plex is able to stream, No becaufe Plex is able to share, No becaufe Plex is able to display on different devices (androis, ios…), no becaufe plex is easy to install and manage for users…
It’s because Plex is able to do everything at once. Easy, light, fast, works well, nice … and centralizes all multimedia needs. This meets the needs of people. If people want to read books and there are no financial or legals constraints so why not read books ?
If I take your reasoning, there would be no speaker and music in cars under pretexts that an engine is made to run a car and move a person from point A to point B.
The people buy Plex because they can centralize their media easily and efficiently without having an IT diploma. 'Cause people can take their media with them everywhere. People watch movies, present their photos, listen to music and read books or magazines!
This has nothing to do with an operating system or a cloud! These solutions meet other needs!
You then go onto to say EXCEPT the viewer!
Which is pretty much the key component isn’t it?
Once again you are 100% incorrect about what I wrote. Plex already has the ability to view jpg’s, and that’s all eComics essentially are, jpg files. So it can already display any eComic page in existence as it is already constructed in every Plex client they currently offer.
As I stated in my original post that you mocked and misread, the ability that needs to be added to Plex in order to add support for eComics is not a Viewer, but the ability to read and parse .zip and .rar archives. Which is what eComics use to store the individual pages of a comic in page order. There are many archive viewers that have been existence for nearly two decades now that can be used for this, whose code is readily available to developers for just such a purpose as this. I’ve used them in some of my own projects I’ve developed. But a new viewer is not needed to be developed at all. Plex already has that capability, and has for a few years now.
@smiths said:
Like some others on this thread, I use ubooquity to stream comics. It
doesn’t send the whole comic file, it just sends one page at a time. Very
efficient!
I’m not sure why people are so against this request, media files certainly
include digital books, audiobooks, and comics. And plex is definitely a
media player! Seems like a perfect fit for those of us that use plex on our
portable devices.
I do not have many comics ebooks or anything of that nature . I can see many benefits to it (for people that can have thousands) I would like to see it added I do not think it would ever be added. as for why people are against it I would have to guess its because they believe plex devlopers has more important problems to solve.
some limiting factors for plex would be is there anywhere plex can grab comics, books, audiobooks etc information (metadata). The agents for that could possibly be user created.
That would then leave them to implement a kind of pdf reader at least to read pdf files if the comics are images it would be possible for them to have it read like this comicname/issue1/1.png - 20.png and then its a matter of moving through the images.
would the effort vs reward be high enough for them to put the enormous amount of work required?
No Comics are CBT files which in essence are zip files. You are asking a server to pull one pic out of an archive to send to you each time you change the page when it is far easier to just send you the entire archive and do it locally.
You want to add the extraction and latency of data to a process that is far more efficient if it just sent you the entire archive and did it locally.
@runeqm said:
would the effort vs reward be high enough for them to put the enormous amount of work required?
Well the best current comic streaming server is maintained by a single person. Comics are generally just image archives and are much less complex than epub and azw3 files. But claiming its simply a file server versus streaming is just ignorance. Arguing against a feature because you (not literally you) think its not real is ridiculous.
That being said getting all of my media under one roof would be awesome. I also realize audiobooks and comics would be much easier to implement than ebooks.
actually comics are cbt files, and cbr files, and cbz files. And all they are is jpg images inside a zip or rar file that is renamed to one of the common eComic formats. I explained this in the first post you quoted that you were unable to comprehend, when you erroneously insisted I wanted a new viewer. And as I then stated later, it would just be a matter of adding code to read an archived file, a type of codebase which has been readily available for nearly 20 years now, and that Plex has used in the past to read rar movie files back in the day. But please do continue to misunderstand everything written here, and rail against something you apparently don’t understand at all. I get new laughs everyday now with every new misinformed comment you make. lol…
@pruitt62 said:
actually comics are cbt files, and cbr files, and cbz files. And all they are is jpg images inside a zip or rar file that is renamed to one of the common eComic formats. I explained this in the first post you quoted that you were unable to comprehend, when you erroneously insisted I wanted a new viewer. And as I then stated later, it would just be a matter of adding code to read an archived file, a type of codebase which has been readily available for nearly 20 years now, and that Plex has used in the past to read rar movie files back in the day. But please do continue to misunderstand everything written here, and rail against something you apparently don’t understand at all. I get new laughs everyday now with every new misinformed comment you make. lol…
I understand it all far better than you do…
There is no way to STREAM A ZIP!
It’s downloaded!
Therefore no reason not to just download the entire thing!
You say it is easy to add the capability…
Well Sync Exists I give you that…
No Reader exists…
No Display code for comics exist…
No scraper for comics exist…
And if thats simple then I guess Plex should support Word Documents and Excel Spreadsheets as well because they are very much media by your definition as Comics and books are!
Pretty much anyone can say a screwdriver can hammer a nail…
That doesn’t make it the right tool for nailing things!
What is streaming for video? It is downloading the video file bit by bit
according to what the user needs.
Streaming for comics does exist, it just depends on how comics are
implemented.
You say streaming for comics doesn’t exist and a comic reader isn’t
implemented. That would be true if the server would send the entire comic
at once to the client and the client has to handle the archive, that’s the
approach from Calibre. But there is a way to stream a comic and in that way
the reader is already available: the server handles the archive and only
sends the needed page to the client, the client only needs to display that
page which is just a photo, that’s the approach from ubooquity. When you
stop reading a comic halfway, you would only have downloaded the first half
of the comic and not the entire comic and when you resume you only need to
download the second half instead of the entire comic once again, that’s
what streaming is.
So you see, both you guys are right about whether or not comics are
streamable, it just depends on how the would be implemented.
The scraper doesn’t exist now, because these files aren’t supported yet,
but I don’t think it would be hard to write a metadata agent using the
comicvine api.
What do you mean with the display code for comics? How they would be
presented in the plex app?
Op donderdag 29 oktober 2015 heeft AsphyxNYC forums+d56331@plex.tv het
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@Bart274 said:
Come on guys, let’s keep this a civil discussion.
What is streaming for video? It is downloading the video file bit by bit
according to what the user needs.
Streaming for comics does exist, it just depends on how comics are
implemented.
You say streaming for comics doesn’t exist and a comic reader isn’t
implemented. That would be true if the server would send the entire comic
at once to the client and the client has to handle the archive, that’s the
approach from Calibre. But there is a way to stream a comic and in that way
the reader is already available: the server handles the archive and only
sends the needed page to the client, the client only needs to display that
page which is just a photo, that’s the approach from ubooquity. When you
stop reading a comic halfway, you would only have downloaded the first half
of the comic and not the entire comic and when you resume you only need to
download the second half instead of the entire comic once again, that’s
what streaming is.
So you see, both you guys are right about whether or not comics are
streamable, it just depends on how the would be implemented.
The scraper doesn’t exist now, because these files aren’t supported yet,
but I don’t think it would be hard to write a metadata agent using the
comicvine api.
What do you mean with the display code for comics? How they would be
presented in the plex app?
Op donderdag 29 oktober 2015 heeft AsphyxNYC het
volgende geschreven:
In the scenario of streaming the server would extract the archive(needs some work on plexs side unless a 3rd party program could be found) and the most likely they would get by as the extracted comic would be a image format plex could add scrapping support for photos and allow user created ones. maybe just using folders would be sufficient. The next issue for comics the only issue would be zooming in on pc but on mobiles /tablets its fine
@Bart274 said:
Come on guys, let’s keep this a civil discussion.
What is streaming for video? It is downloading the video file bit by bit
according to what the user needs.
Streaming for comics does exist, it just depends on how comics are
implemented.
You say streaming for comics doesn’t exist and a comic reader isn’t
implemented. That would be true if the server would send the entire comic
at once to the client and the client has to handle the archive, that’s the
approach from Calibre. But there is a way to stream a comic and in that way
the reader is already available: the server handles the archive and only
sends the needed page to the client, the client only needs to display that
page which is just a photo, that’s the approach from ubooquity. When you
stop reading a comic halfway, you would only have downloaded the first half
of the comic and not the entire comic and when you resume you only need to
download the second half instead of the entire comic once again, that’s
what streaming is.
So you see, both you guys are right about whether or not comics are
streamable, it just depends on how the would be implemented.
The scraper doesn’t exist now, because these files aren’t supported yet,
but I don’t think it would be hard to write a metadata agent using the
comicvine api.
What do you mean with the display code for comics? How they would be
presented in the plex app?
Op donderdag 29 oktober 2015 heeft AsphyxNYC het
volgende geschreven:
Exactly. Good to see there’s someone posting in this thread with the ability to think in a logical manner, that also understands the fact Plex already “streams” photos, and comics could be handled the exact same way by the server reading the archive one page at a time (Plex did at one time read rar files for chunks of video, so it could obviously do that again if the devs desired it to). Meaning there’s would would not be very much work needed in the clients to support viewing them. The server would just deliver (or “stream” if that’s the buzzword people are getting hung up on) the pages individually, and the existing Plex Photo viewer would display them. Reading files from inside a zip or rar archive is trivial in this day and age, and has been for nearly 20 years now, so in no way is that an obstacle.
You could download the entire comic in the same time you might get 20 seconds of a video. You couldn’t even read a single page in the time it would take to download an entire comic.
There is no need to stream it.
Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean that is the best way to do it!
See the drive a nail with a screwdriver example I gave you…
Sure you could hammer a nail with a screwdriver but a hammer does it better and more efficiently.
Indeed, there is no need to ‘stream’ the comic because you could download
the comic in one time easily, but by streaming it, Plex would have
knowledge about where you are in that comic.
Also if you start reading on your iphone and stop half way and continue
reading on your ipad, you would have to download the complete comic twice
in your setup, but only once in our setup…
Op donderdag 5 november 2015 heeft AsphyxNYC forums+d56331@plex.tv het
volgende geschreven:
