Release Pandora Image Viewer


Kind of fun to look back to the old posts. For example:

I don't have a lot of time, so I will be short.

Thumbnails: not anytime soon.

Rotation: not anytime soon.

Deletion: OK

Share (eg email): maybe

File associations: probably, where's the relevant thread again?

PNG files: already faster than other viewers, will optimize further. Currently zlib is the bottleneck, will try to find a faster one.
Bringing that up to date:

Thumbnails: done.

Rotation: done.

Deletion: OK

Share (eg email): done. (well, you select images and do something with them like make a .zip file or a web gallery, that's close enough)

File associations: done.

PNG files: OK, and nearly any other image format too.
 
First off: Thank you, _wb_! This is a great application that makes reading ebooks/comics extremely comfortable on the pandora.

Second: How hard would it be to introduce zip support? Some of my reading material is separated by chapter into individual zip files (each zip containing a jpeg file for each page), and it would be really very convenient to have a zip folder feature, where zipped images are viewable, but can not be edited. If you can't think of an easy solution, I will add researching the topic to my "to do" list.

Thanks again for all your fantastic Pandora-specific apps.
 
Adding support for .zip files is more or less trivial if I can just unzip them in memory. If you need support for big zip files (i.e. bigger than, say, 200MB uncompressed) it's harder.

I'll add this on my todo list.
 
Thanks! I just spent some time looking into libarchive, and I would guess the less trivial way would be saving the unzipped files to appdata and then deleting upon closure. Could become nasty if crashes occur with files still unzipped unless you create a specific directory in appdata that would be cleared upon PIV start.

Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.
 
Oh and to clarify, I think the trivial solution would work perfectly fine for my purposes.
 
Thanks! I just spent some time looking into libarchive, and I would guess the less trivial way would be saving the unzipped files to appdata and then deleting upon closure. Could become nasty if crashes occur with files still unzipped unless you create a specific directory in appdata that would be cleared upon PIV start.


Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.
I'm currently implementing this. I'm decompressing to a folder in /tmp (which maps to RAM on the Pandora), to avoid writing to your SD card. The only disadvantage is that the entire uncompressed archive has to fit in memory, so on 256MB CC units with big zip files it could be an issue. I assume that usually such archives should be only a few dozen MB large, so it should be fine.

In order to make this approach work, I'm adding basic filesystem navigation to PIV's thumbnail mode now: besides the image thumbnails, you can also see subdirectories and go to them by doubletapping or pressing A or B or Enter. Archives are shown as a special type of "subdirectory". When you go to a different directory, PIV will effectively quit (so if you made any changes or selected files, you'll get the usual dialogues) and restart itself. If it is started with an archive file instead of a directory name, the run script will extract the archive to /tmp and run the viewer on that. It's a bit ugly (screen will flash when you change directory), but at least it is better than the current situation.

Is it OK to just show all the images in the archive (ignoring any directory structure), or do people want to use archives with directory structures inside where flattening things to a single sequence of files would be bad? I could do either, but if the directory structure has to be shown, it could be annoying in those cases where there's just one single directory inside the archive.

Oh, and could someone point me to some test files (real comic book archive files)?
 
What happens if in the archive is an archive?
At the moment there is no support for nested archives (since it is unpacking to a fixed directory), but it would not be too hard to add support for that (by using unique directory names). It would be quite wasteful in terms of memory though: e.g. a zip file containing a rar file containing jpeg files would mean you have to fit the rar file and the jpeg files in memory before PIV is even started. It does not make a lot of sense to do that in terms of compression, since general-purpose compression is not going to do much with already compressed images. It's probably best to just use non-nested tar, where any structure is represented with directories, not nesting.
 
Flattening the archive works great for me, as my archives each contain one folder. Ziz brings up a good point though.
 
Hi,

Could somebody check if this PNG file is displayed correctly in PIV. I get a black screen when I open it, and I wonder if the problem is with PIV or with my system

screen1.png
 
Hi,

Could somebody check if this PNG file is displayed correctly in PIV. I get a black screen when I open it, and I wonder if the problem is with PIV or with my system
Unless the picture goes through a conversion through downloading it from the board, it works fine in PIV
 
Hi,

Could somebody check if this PNG file is displayed correctly in PIV. I get a black screen when I open it, and I wonder if the problem is with PIV or with my system
Not related but I have had issues with a number of pictures in PIV, _wb_ is aware of it but he's too busy with his dutch porn novel right now to fix the bugs :)
 
Hi,

Could somebody check if this PNG file is displayed correctly in PIV. I get a black screen when I open it, and I wonder if the problem is with PIV or with my system
Not related but I have had issues with a number of pictures in PIV, _wb_ is aware of it but he's too busy with his dutch porn novel right now to fix the bugs :)
Huh?!  Is there such a thing?
 
Hi,

Could somebody check if this PNG file is displayed correctly in PIV. I get a black screen when I open it, and I wonder if the problem is with PIV or with my system
Works fine when I try it. Maybe the forum does something weird. Could also be that there are other files in your folder that somehow trigger a bug -- even if you open specifically that image, PIV will be aggressively pre-loading other images in the folder.

Hi,

Could somebody check if this PNG file is displayed correctly in PIV. I get a black screen when I open it, and I wonder if the problem is with PIV or with my system
Not related but I have had issues with a number of pictures in PIV, _wb_ is aware of it but he's too busy with his dutch porn novel right now to fix the bugs :)
Huh?!  Is there such a thing?
http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/16632-looking-for-draft-readers-dutch-only/

It's a feminist science-fiction porn novel, written in Dutch, to be precise.

I think I fixed the issue ekianjo is talking about by the way, so expect an update in a few days. Just need to fix some issues with the nested archive navigation.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
False alarm from my side by the way. The picture on forums was exact copy, but it worked on my unit this time. Perhaps it's just me playing with a future version of cdevtools and setting all kinds of system variables to the weirdest values which broke it. I'm pretty certain however that I've stumbled upon pictures which did not display. Can't wait for the update!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
New version on the repo!

This update was long overdue -- it's the first update since the compo.

New features:

- Navigate subdirectories
- Support for archives (zip, rar, cbz, cbr, .tar.gz, and so on)
- Flickr uploading
 
Back
Top