Live data from Hacker News

Libbbf: Bound Book Format, A high-performance container for comics and manga

github.com

1–10 of 66 posts

Re: Libbbf: Bound Book Format, A high-performance container for comics and manga

#4
The feature matrix says cbz/zip doesn't have random page access, but it definitely does. Zip also supports appending more files without too much overhead.

Certainly there's a complexity argument to be made, because you don't actually need compression just to hold a bundle of files. But these days zip just works.

The perf measurement charts also make no sense. What exactly are they measuring?

Edit:

This reddit post seems to go into more depth on performance: old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qi64pr/comment/o0pqaeo/

Re: Libbbf: Bound Book Format, A high-performance container for comics and manga

#6
At a glance this looks like an obviously nicer format that a zip of jpegs, but I struggle to think of a time I thought "wow CBZ is a problem here".

I didn't even realize random access is not possible, presumably because readers just support it by linear scanning or putting everything in memory at once, and comic size is peanuts compared to modern memory size.

I suppose this becomes more useful if you have multiple issues/volumes in a single archive.

Re: Libbbf: Bound Book Format, A high-performance container for comics and manga

#7

The feature matrix says cbz/zip doesn't have random page access, but it definitely does. Zip also supports appending more files without too much overhead. Certainly there's a complexity argument to be made, because you don't actually need compression just to hold a bundle of files. But these days zip just works. The perf measurement charts also make no sense. What exactly are they measuring? Edit: This reddit post se…

Zip also has per-asset checksums, contrary to the comparison table.

And what's the point of aligning the files to be "DirectStorage-ready" if they're going to be JPEGs, a format that, as far as I know, DirectStorage doesn't understand?

And the author says it's a problem that "Metadata isn't native to CBZ, you have to use a ComicInfo.xml file.", but... that's not a problem at all?

The whole thing makes no sense.

Re: Libbbf: Bound Book Format, A high-performance container for comics and manga

#8
post #6

At a glance this looks like an obviously nicer format that a zip of jpegs, but I struggle to think of a time I thought "wow CBZ is a problem here". I didn't even realize random access is not possible, presumably because readers just support it by linear scanning or putting everything in memory at once, and comic size is peanuts compared to modern memory size. I suppose this becomes more useful if you have multiple is…

Random access is completely possible within a zip, to the degree that it's needed for cbz; you might not be able to randomly access within a file, if for some reason the cbz was stored with deflate on a jpeg, but you can always access individual files independently of each other, so seeking to a random page is O(1).

Re: Libbbf: Bound Book Format, A high-performance container for comics and manga

#9
post #5

I assume the comparison table is supposed to have something other than footnotes (e.g. check-marks or X's)? That's not showing for me on Firefox

There are emojis in the table for green check marks, red crosses, and yellow warning signs.

Do the emojis not show for you?

Re: Libbbf: Bound Book Format, A high-performance container for comics and manga

#10
Honest question, something I don't understand, if you use DirectStorage to move images directly to the GPU (I assume into the VRAM) where the decoding take place? directly on the GPU? Can GPU decode PNG? it is very unfriendly format for GPU as far as I know
Post reply on HN