Empty folders

Hi,
the symptoms you describe usually happen with files that have an extension recognized by Ubooquity (cbr, cbz, pdf, epub, mobi) but that can't be opened by Ubooquity.

The reasons the files can't be opened can be (among others):

• encrypted file
• DRM protected file
• corrupted file
• wrong file extension with a real file type not supported by Ubooquity
• etc.

When this happens, an error will be written to your log file during the scan. Take one of your files that have this problem and look for its name of in the log file, you should find the error.
You can also send me the full log file (tom 'at' vaemendis.net) so that I can take a look at the errors that occurred and check if everything works as intended.

excellent, as soon as I get a chance I'll do another re scan and send you the log.
thanks Tom

I went thru the log and searched one of the files that wouldnt open but it was chinese to me :p i sent a copy of the log.

I have studied your log files, and indeed for a few of them, Ubooquity fails to extract the first image of the comic book (the cover).
All failing files are CBR files. So I suppose the problem comes from the library I use to read RAR (CBR) files. The files are either corrupted or use a specific version of RAR that is not supported by the library.
Unfortunately there is not much I can do to solve the problem. If you want them to be readable in Ubooquity I would advise to recompress them (extract the content of the files and recompress them).

If you send me one of the files I can try to understand a bit more what's the problem, but I'm quite pessimistic on the outcome.

I had the same problem with some of my cbr files. Could not open them. Within Ubooquity the files have a gray book icon (for easy spotting). But I had opened the files successfully with an other comic book reader. On closer inspection of the cbr files that would not open, I found a thump.db file within the cbr archive. Probably the original scanner has copy-ed the thump.db files into the cbr archive in error, because those files are hidden under default Windows settings. Ubooquity can't open cbr files containing a thump.db file. You can use WinRar to open the cbr files and remove the thump.db file within the archive. When you remove the thump.db file WinRar will make a new cbr file and overwrites the old one. Now Ubooquity can open all my cbr files.

i will attempt this and get back to you Emmanuel.

I tried to reproduce the problem by adding a thumbs.db file to a CBR comic, but it did not work (the comic was still readable by Ubooquity).
I suspect that the removal of the "thumbs.db" file from the archive triggered a recompression by WinRar which fixed the problem (meaning that a simple recompression without removing the "thumbs.db" would have worked too).

I did not test putting back the thumb.db file to reproduce the problem. I did have more then 30 cbr files containing thumb.db files who would not open. It must be a coincidence than. Recompiling the cbr file fixes the problem.

Hi,

I have in my comic folders some folders that have no know comics files (cbr, cbz or pdf) but only jpg files, and ubooquity shows a white folder with 0 comics. Would it be possible not to show such folders with 0 comics cbr, cbz or pdf files?

Thanks in advance

Yes, I'll add an option for that.

I have found that folders or files containing a special character ( #, ', (, é, à, -, ., etc) cannot be processed correctly. I.e. The image cannot be extracted, the comics is not dispayed or the folder will show 0 files. Does it comes from Ubooquity or from java that needs locale to be set up?

Java is supposed to be able to manage all charset, so the problem should not come from your locale.
I have not been able to reproduce this problem (at least on Windows): I have a lot of comics whose names contains accents, and they all work fine.
Could you check in your log file if there are some errors when Ubooquity tries to import the files ? (if you want, just send me the log file and I'll take a look).
And could you tell me which operating system you use (Windows, Linux, OS X...) ?

Hi Tom, KUDOS on your great initiative to bring streaming comic books to the rest of us! I've been looking for such an app for some time now and first tried ComicStreamer but this one is not (yet) available for my Synology NAS and seems to be lagging behind on your Ubooquity initiative...

I've managed to get the latest version (1.7.0) running on my Synology NAS thanks to the detailed instructions of Matthew Sanders. The link to the Synology installer packages (http://www.synologylab.webspace.virginmedia.com/files/) however does NOT seem to work anymore... I don't know if you can do something about this but I think a lot of Sysnology owners would really appreciate to have this link operational again.

I bumped into the same problem of not being able to read/stream .cbr format comics as described above! The funny things however are:

1. Sometimes the first page (=cover page) can be read, but the following not
2. The server however ALWAYS seems to be able to generate the Thumb <= so if it takes this from the .cbr I don't really get why it (sometimes) would not read the first page (=cover page) when in 'read' mode...

Anyway, extracting and re-RARing the complete .cbr directory seems to solve the problem... However, as I have many .cbr files that give me this problem I presume I'm not the only one and it would be great to have it solved from the code side. I would be happy to assist in any way I can (send you log files and/or .cbr files that can't be read...)

Oh, and something else: is there ANY iOS app that uses the OPDS feed (or any other API that you would have integrated into your server code) and hence does NOT use the Web i/f? It seems like Chunky Comic Reader holds the best cards but I can't seem to get connected to my server somehow... I must be doing something wrong. I enter the following as OPDS Server address: MyIP:2202/opds-comics (even tried MyUserName:MyPassWord@MyIP:2202/opds-comics) but that does not seem to work. Any advise here?

Thanks!

Greetz,

Bruno

Solved the problem of Chunky Comic Reader: you need to enter the complete URL => http://MyUserName:MyPassWord@MyIP:2202/opds-comics

However, there's no streaming service then... :-( <= only downloading

Lots of questions here, I'll try not to forget anything. :)

• Broken link of the Synology package: unfortunately I merely added a link to the forum thread in the F.A.Q. I am not in contact with the author of the package. The most efficient thing to do would probably be for you to ask him directly on the Synology forum. 
  According to his signature, the packages he made are available on the following repository: https://synopackages.welike.technology/
  Might be worth a try...
• Problems with CBR files: Ubooquity uses a third-party library (called Junrar) to access images contained in RAR (cbr) files. The lib has not evolved for years and I don't have the skills to fix it. So improvements to the way Ubooquity manages cbr files is highly unlikely.
  But to be honest I never understood why people thought it would be a good idea to package comics in RAR files rather than in Zip files. Personally I convert all the cbr files I get to cbz files as a matter of principle.
• OPDS: You don't like the web interface ? ;) The only application supporting streaming with OPDS is an Android one: Challenger Comics Viewer. That's because the OPDS standard is not made for streaming and we add to extend it. The good news is we wrote specifications for this (very small) extension. So every developper of a comics reading application is free to add streaming support with immediate compatibility with Ubooquity.

Hi Tom,

Thanks for getting back to me so swift!

• Broken link of the Synology package: unfortunately I merely added a link to the forum thread in the F.A.Q. I am not in contact with the author of the package. The most efficient thing to do would probably be for you to ask him directly on the Synology forum.  <= OK I'll give it a try!
  According to his signature, the packages he made are available on the following repository:https://synopackages.welike.technology/
  Might be worth a try... <= already added the link to my package sources but nothing comes up...
• Problems with CBR files: Ubooquity uses a third-party library (called Junrar) to access images contained in RAR (cbr) files. The lib has not evolved for years and I don't have the skills to fix it. So improvements to the way Ubooquity manages cbr files is highly unlikely.
  But to be honest I never understood why people thought it would be a good idea to package comics in RAR files rather than in Zip files. Personally I convert all the cbr files I get to cbz files as a matter of principle. <= OK, fair enough! I'll write a script to recompress all the .cbr files (maybe to cbz if there's a real advantage to this) so that the problem gets fixed
• OPDS: You don't like the web interface ? ;) The only application supporting streaming with OPDS is an Android one:Challenger Comics Viewer. That's because the OPDS standard is not made for streaming and we add to extend it. The good news is we wrote specifications for this (very small) extension. So every developper of a comics reading application is free to add streaming support with immediate compatibility with Ubooquity. <= As a matter of fact I do like your web interface! But I'm missing some (rather basic) functions that one can find in a 'normal' comic reader app such as double page view, and I also would like to get rid of all the browser stuff and just see the comic page(s) <= this is possible on a PC but haven't figured it out on an iPad (yet). Browsing through pages on an iPad / tablet is also not possible with swiping and closing the comic book is awkward... let's just say there is still a lot of room for improement on the Web i/f side! ;-)

No need for OPDS. I use Mercury browser on my iPad. It has a full screen mode. Excellent for comic reading.  I use it for all my Synology packages. Remembers your passwords to.

Bruno! My bud.

The advantage to re-archiving your files to CBZ is that zip archives are read and written to much quicker than rar. That makes scanning new files and extracting their metadata/thumbnail quicker when your files are zips. We should also support the open standard instead of the proprietary algorithm ;)

You can very quickly convert all of your files by:

1. Download ZenCBR, place it in your comics root, run and use the 'T' option to have ZenCBR scan all of your files and fix the extension. Many, many, many comics files are incorrectly given the .cbr extension when they are actually zips and also the other way around.
2. Download ComicRack, install then run the program.
3. Go to Edit > Preferences and add your comic root to the library.
4. Right click on smart lists and make a new smart list to show only your CBR files [file format is "eComic (RAR)"]:
   
5. Select all of the files now shown in ComicRack, these are your CBR files. Right-click and choose to convert to CBZ:
   

Regarding the web interface I agree that it is missing some basic functionality, but Tom had mentioned in another thread that the generated html is very closely tied to the program language in such a way that it would be very difficult to externalize the interface for modders and skinners.

I wrote an User Script (greasemonkey) that leveraged jQuery to add in features like caching pages, supporting device widths less than 1024 pixels, manually setting page width and auto-adjusting page-width for less than 1024 pixels, but there was a roadblock where I didn't want to have to go back over the script everytime Ubooquity goes up a version and the GreaseMonkey Firefox addon isn't available in Firefox mobile so I just deleted the script. Oops. Oh well, at least we know it's possible. And if we wanted to go the hacky user script route, yes, we could edit the interface in almost any way we wished, but that is not the ideal long-term solution.

@ Mattew: thanks zo much for this very detailed and resourceful reply!

1. Downloaded and tried ZenCBR but the tool does not seem to work recursively (although it should...) so it was of little use as I'm not going to repeat the T command on every single sub directory in my Comic Books library... I must be doing something wrong here
2. Downloaded and configured ComicRack and it's doing it's thing as I'm writing this reply. It seems to be working OK, it takes quite some time to crunch through my -not too extensive- library <= started the whole thing barely a week ago and I'm quite pleased with the result I have at present (library on Synology NAS, served by Ubooquity and streamed to any possible device with a web client, both from local network as from the Internet
3. I'm all in favor for Open Source and Open Standards! So I kicked all the .cbr and replaced them with .cbz (well, in a couple of hours anyway... ;-))
4. Web i/f: like I already said, I do like it and it's quite 'usable' to say the least. I am looking forward to later versions where hopefully some features are improved / functionalities are added.

Anyway, Tom has my support and I'll put the money where my mouth is! :-)

For some reason I get different results using ZenCBR on a network drive. Local drives => no problems finding files in sub folders. Hope this helps.