[Kavita] .cbw support

[CuddleBear92]

Idea Description

.cbw is comic book web files, they don't contain any of the images themselves but is rather just an metadata file with the image urls saved in the text file.
This makes them tiny and is perfect for mobile use and other things.

Most urls out there is static, aslong as they are online they should be loadable.

On the Kavita side, you would load in the image url directly instead of the image file in the WebUI.

These files can easily be converted later down the line by the user if the files are still online obviously!

This gives the user the ability to have an entire website "stored" in just a gigabyte or two at most while having all the metadata locally and giving the user all the metadata control a client like Kavita or ComicRack might support!

In the end it gives the user more control over online files, being able to process metadata from the sites in bulk.
Most of the sites i have tested this one has static image urls with CDN's which doesnt have much say in the end.
Don't see it being a huge issue in the future.

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/CBW

In the end you get the power from a local and personal client with all the metadata and processing you might need while streaming the raw image files.

Idea Category

Feature Enhancement

Duration of Using Kavita

since 2022

Before submitting

• I've already searched for existing ideas before posting.

[scare376]

Ngl I hate the idea of this. this format goes against the whole idea of self hosting

[scare376]

To be clear. The format itself not necessarily your idea

[scare376]

Your point of them being tiny and good for mobile is kind of moot. This makes sense locally on the device itself but you must remember Kavita is a server software. The easiest way for this to be implemented Kavita would need to download the images to the cache and then serve them with our normal reader.

In order to make this work the way you seem to expect it to work the reader would likely need heavy modification in order for your device to reach out to the URL provided by the file and download the images directly.

[majora2007]

I'm in agreement that this doesn't really fit within Kavita, since self hosting is all about owning the content. There are a lot of edge cases to handle here to support this, especially when urls die out. The scope of code to support this and the lack of prevalence (this is the first time I'm hearing about it, I've never seen one in the wild) means it's a very niche feature.

I'll leave the FR open, but I am unlikely to implement support for this.