Libbbf: Bound Book Format, A high-performance container for comics and manga
github.com40 points by zdw 4 hours ago
40 points by zdw 4 hours ago
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/
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.
It makes no sense because it's some degree of AI slop: https://reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qi64pr/i_got_into_...
Note that he doesn't quite say, when asked pointblank how much AI he used in his erroneous microbenchmarking, that he didn't use AI: https://reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qi64pr/i_got_into_...
Which explains all of it.
Kudos to /u/teraflop, for having infinitely more patience with this than I would.
That whole subreddit has unfortunately become inundated with AI slop.
It used to be a decent resource to learn about what services people were self hosting. But now, many posts are variations of, “I’ve made this huge complicated app in an afternoon please install it on your server”. I’ve even seen a vibe-coded password manager posted there.
Reputable alternatives to the software posted there exist a a huge amount of the time. Not to mention audited alternatives in the case of password managers, or even just actively maintained alternatives.
Bullshit asymmetry by way of impulsive LLM slop strikes again.
Every new readme, announcement post, and codebase is tailored to achieve maximum bloviation.
No substance, no credibility———just vibes.
> Footer indexed
So, like ZIP?
> Uses XXH3 for integrity checks
I don’t think XXH3 is suitable for that purpose. It’s not cryptographically secure and designed mostly for stuff like hash tables (e.g. relatively small data).
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.
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).
But with which library are you able to host these? And which scraper currently finds manga with chapters in that file format? does anybody have experience hosting their own manga server & downloading them?
I thought zips already support random access?
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?
They do not.
[edit]
If I download the README I can see them in every program on my system except Firefox. I previously had issues with CJK only not displaying in Firefox, so there's probably some workaround specific to it...
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