Anyone against this idea clearly does not have a large collection of media.
You could use the same argument for music. Each song is only a few MB. At
low bitrate, even less. Why stream it using Plex? Why not just use dropbox?
The answer is because it becomes a ridiculous management effort at scale.
I don’t want to copy over and store anything locally. That would mean
having to decide which of the thousands of comics and books I want on each
device. It means I have to actively manage a huge library, like I used to
have to do with music (before all the cloud services became popular).
Instead, I want it my comics to reside on a server in the same way as my TV
shows, music and movies and access them as I need. I want it in a nice,
easy to use, easily browsable and searchable format. I want it to
automatically present the cover art and any details that can be extracted
from the CBR/CBZ. I want it to automatically search through folders and
categorize them by title. I want it to automatically down convert large
jpgs. You know… exactly the things Plex does.
@AsphyxNYC said:
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.
You’re not making any sense in your arguments. Yes we understand that cbz/cbr/cbt are archive files and you can’t “stream” them because you need the entire file in order to access the files inside. But it’s obvious that if this was implemented into Plex it wouldn’t work this way. Like video transcoding, most of the work is done server-side, extracting images from said archives into a temp cache, possibly resizing/resampling those images to accommodate device screen size and/or bandwidth, and sending them to you image by image. Manga reader apps on mobile devices have a similar function except for the fact that they scrape images from websites, but essentially you’re receiving the pages 1 by 1 and you barely notice it because it takes at least a few seconds to read or admire a page. Not to ention that most Ebook files like epub and mobi that I have seen are tiny (usually under 1MB) so if you can stream video efficiently remotely, then you can handle receiving an entire file in most cases and i’m pretty sure there are other ways of handling them.
I’m not making any sense to you because you are not grasping the key point made…
What is the LARGEST SIZED CBT you own?
How long does it take to transfer that entire file compared to having a server rip it apart and send you one page at a time and HOPING latency doesn’t delay that next page from displaying because you lost connection?
You can download an entire CBT in the time it takes to read a single page!
And if you can’t then streaming isn’t going to work for you either
@AsphyxNYC said:
I’m not making any sense to you because you are not grasping the key point made…
What is the LARGEST SIZED CBT you own?
How long does it take to transfer that entire file compared to having a server rip it apart and send you one page at a time and HOPING latency doesn’t delay that next page from displaying because you lost connection?
You can download an entire CBT in the time it takes to read a single page!
And if you can’t then streaming isn’t going to work for you either
The average size for an eComic I’ve seen is about 30 to 50MB with the pages inside as ~1MB Jpegs. Sure there are omnibus versions that would be much larger or people who prefer to have higher quality formats but that is the average for both legal and non legal sources. On my crappy q8200 it takes less than a second to extract all the files inside that 50MB cbr file and even faster if it was just stored without compression. Now I’m pretty sure that I would start reading faster with my server extracting it and sending me the first few pages and keep sending me the rest than to transfer the entire 50MB file to my phone or tablet. Sure you could lose the connection but the same could be said about transcoding. You lose your connection you can’t keep watching the video.
+1 for this, I’m currently running Calibre AND Ubooquity servers on my plex server to serve various forms of Ebooks, and cutting it down to just adding a library in Plex would save me an unbelievable amount of hassle, and the Mangafox channel even gives you a decent idea for the layout.
If at least two seperate standalone apps can justify their whole existence based on the concept of an ebook server (not to mention the existing XBMC support), I think the case for it being a useful feature has already been made
please make sure you “Like” the original post not just adding +1.
the like of the post is what flags the feature to the developers. I would still love to see this years later its not around. where is the support for eBooks and comics?
I see a lot of focus on the comics. While cool, I really want the audiobook part. Tried using music option, but its missing certain features to be useful.
@pruitt62 said:
Rodger Combs wrote on May 7 2013, 8:35 PM: »
Do you really need Plex to be the media player? Why not use Netflix and YouTube for your videos and Pandora for your music?
There’s no way right now to build a library of your books (comic or not) on a central server you control and view them in a decent app on desktop, laptop, and mobile devices. I’m not sure how QoS comes into this, and Plex has photo channels already, which also don’t require constant streams.
That is not necessarily correct. Calibre pretty much handles all of that, and much, much more. And best of all, like Plex, it’'s free.
@pruitt62 said:
Rodger Combs wrote on May 7 2013, 8:35 PM: »
Unfortunately the Calibre web server is … sucky, at best. Oh, and it requires you to open up your firewall to get to it. Not optimal
that does not sound at all like a good solution. Would love for Plex to be my one solution for all my media books, magazines, and comics are really the only media left not covered by plex that I can think of.
It’s a shame this isn’t yet even in the realm of possibility. I understand the Plex people don’t want to get into this mess, but since the add-on architecture that exists doesn’t extend to adding library types it can’t be added by a third party either.
I have a huge library and having comicstreamer installed has only made it more painful to see how easy it would be to close this gap.
@eduo said:
It’s a shame this isn’t yet even in the realm of possibility. I understand the Plex people don’t want to get into this mess, but since the add-on architecture that exists doesn’t extend to adding library types it can’t be added by a third party either.
I have a huge library and having comicstreamer installed has only made it more painful to see how easy it would be to close this gap.
Where do you understand that from? Have they announced that they are not going to implement this?
@eduo said:
It’s a shame this isn’t yet even in the realm of possibility. I understand the Plex people don’t want to get into this mess, but since the add-on architecture that exists doesn’t extend to adding library types it can’t be added by a third party either.
I have a huge library and having comicstreamer installed has only made it more painful to see how easy it would be to close this gap.
Where do you understand that from? Have they announced that they are not going to implement this?
They have several times stated this is not under their current scope (current: For the past five years). This request is from 2013 but in reality it goes as far back as the XBMC days (I remember a thread in the XBMC forums from 2003 or thereabouts).
To me it seems a logical and obvious addition but we haven’t been able to make the Plex team either see it this way or decide the benefits overweight the risks.
@eduo said:
They have several times stated this is not under their current scope (current: For the past five years). This request is from 2013 but in reality it goes as far back as the XBMC days (I remember a thread in the XBMC forums from 2003 or thereabouts).
I may have missed it, but can you point us to any of the several times Plex stated it’s not under their current scope?
