2006-07-18, 06:38
Hi,
I was amazed when I found out that XBMC supports CBR/CBZ comic files. It is great!
I've been using this feature a lot since I discovered it and I must say that I works pretty well, however there are a pair of features that would make it even better:
1.- Could you guys add a way to automatically zoom the image horizontally? Right now, clicking on the Y (yellow) button XBMC zooms the image vertically, so that the whole image fits in the screen. It would be cool if clicking Y again zoomed the screen horizontally, which would make reading comics, which often are made of pictures whose height is bigger than their width. So clicking the Y button would alternate between vertical zoom and horizontal zoom.
2.- I'd be awesome if there were some sort of "catching" mechanism that were performed on the pictures contained on the CBR or CBZ file. Right now once you click on the right trigger it takes a while (up to a few seconds) to read and show the next image on the comic (specially if the comic resides in a network share). It would be great if XBMC read the following image and kept it in memory so that could you go instantaneously to the next page on the comic book or the next image on a slideshow. There is catching for video, so why not for pictures as well?
3.- My last suggestion is just a "nice to have", not very important but it would be a nice plus. I'd be cool if you could apply some sort of filter (specially a sharpening filter) to the images contained on the CBR or CBZ files. Comic book images often contain text that has been scanned and it is sometimes hard to read. A sharpening filter might solve (or reduce) this issue. It would also be cool to be able to apply a black and white, or even a grayscale filter to the comic book images.
Although I make this suggestions in the context of comic viewing, I think that these would be useful also for regular picture viewing (even #3 could be fun with regular pictures, IMHO). So I hope that someone pics this up and adds this features to XBMC!
Thanks for reading this!
Amadawn
I was amazed when I found out that XBMC supports CBR/CBZ comic files. It is great!
I've been using this feature a lot since I discovered it and I must say that I works pretty well, however there are a pair of features that would make it even better:
1.- Could you guys add a way to automatically zoom the image horizontally? Right now, clicking on the Y (yellow) button XBMC zooms the image vertically, so that the whole image fits in the screen. It would be cool if clicking Y again zoomed the screen horizontally, which would make reading comics, which often are made of pictures whose height is bigger than their width. So clicking the Y button would alternate between vertical zoom and horizontal zoom.
2.- I'd be awesome if there were some sort of "catching" mechanism that were performed on the pictures contained on the CBR or CBZ file. Right now once you click on the right trigger it takes a while (up to a few seconds) to read and show the next image on the comic (specially if the comic resides in a network share). It would be great if XBMC read the following image and kept it in memory so that could you go instantaneously to the next page on the comic book or the next image on a slideshow. There is catching for video, so why not for pictures as well?
3.- My last suggestion is just a "nice to have", not very important but it would be a nice plus. I'd be cool if you could apply some sort of filter (specially a sharpening filter) to the images contained on the CBR or CBZ files. Comic book images often contain text that has been scanned and it is sometimes hard to read. A sharpening filter might solve (or reduce) this issue. It would also be cool to be able to apply a black and white, or even a grayscale filter to the comic book images.
Although I make this suggestions in the context of comic viewing, I think that these would be useful also for regular picture viewing (even #3 could be fun with regular pictures, IMHO). So I hope that someone pics this up and adds this features to XBMC!
Thanks for reading this!
Amadawn
), but I really think that the "My Pictures" feature of XBMC would get much better if XBMC catched the next (and perhaps even the previous) image on the slideshow. Right now it is really quite slot when accessing files on a samba server. Also, it would be cool to have an indication that it is loading the next picture when you click the right trigger. Sometimes it is hard to tell if XBMC is loading the next picture or if it just did not register your button click.