Rockbox Development > Feature Ideas

treat zip files as folders

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solrize:
Lots of times, albums are distributed as zip archives containing a number of flac, ogg, or mp3 files.  It's a nuisance to have to unpack them to a player into a directory full of files for individual tracks.  It would be great to be able to just copy the .zip file to the player, and have rockbox treat the zip as if it were a folder, supporting normal playback and (preferably) navigation functions.  If it's not possible to add or delete entries to a zip, that is ok; main thing is to be able to play files that are inside the zip.

AlexP:
A couple of thoughts:

This would likely be very slow.  The processors in the majority of our targets are not speedy.

Furthermore, having an unzip routine in the core (as would be needed for this) would add quite a bit of code for not (IMO) a huge benefit - if you have to copy a zip file onto the player why not just uncompress it at the same time?  You could write an unzip plugin if you are willing to put up with the time and battery it would take to use it.

solrize:
1. I don't think it would be slow or add much code, at least for deflate.  The zlib uncompression routine is very simple and fast.  Compression is much slower but that's not what's used here.  I think all current dap's that are sensible rockbox targets have cpu's that are more than fast enough.  Remember that zip format goes back to the pc-xt era (4.77 mhz 16 bit cpu) so by that standard, today's ARM processors are practically supercomputers.

2. Of course unpacking the zip when I put it on the player is what I do now.  It's just that these zips are so common that it would be a significant convenience win to be able to just drop them onto the player without unpacking.

3. The idea of a plugin is interesting, I'll have to look at it further. Thanks.

bluebrother:

--- Quote from: solrize on September 14, 2008, 01:15:53 PM ---1. I don't think it would be slow or add much code, at least for deflate.
--- End quote ---
Playing mp3 files contained in a zip with foobar2000 makes it noticably slower, at least for me.


--- Quote ---I think all current dap's that are sensible rockbox targets have cpu's that are more than fast enough.  Remember that zip format goes back to the pc-xt era (4.77 mhz 16 bit cpu) so by that standard, today's ARM processors are practically supercomputers.
--- End quote ---
back those times you didn't compress 50+ MiB into an archive. Also, keep in mind that the format itself has moved to support better compression. Last, you also need to play the extracted content the same time.


--- Quote ---It's just that these zips are so common that it would be a significant convenience win to be able to just drop them onto the player without unpacking.
--- End quote ---
I don't have any on my player, and I don't think they are common -- if I encode CDs I see no point in putting the resulting files into an archive, and music bought on itunes and the like also doesn't come in a zip file. Besides, if you have such a zip file, I bet this has some kind of compression enabled. Supporting deflate only would most likely work on a minority of those "common" files, if not even less. Which would make this additional convenience for you somewhat pointless.

Also, IMO this would only add unnecessary complexity for almost no gain.

Strife89:
I keep a lot of text files and tracker-format songs in ZIPs, and this usually saves a pretty good deal of space (especially because the smaller files are no longer hogging a 64KB cluster when they're ~10KB, and the like on FAT). Most of these archives would not be very large. Though I agree that it probably wouldn't justify adding ZIP support to the core of the firmware, I'd still love to see a plugin. The user could "launch" a ZIP file and just see a list of contents, then choose a file to extract.

Also, slow unzips do not bother me. On my Palm with a program called UniCMD, it takes a full minute to unzip a file that, unzipped, is a megabyte in size. Yet I do it all the time, even though my desktop could do the job in a second. The reason? I have time, but I do not have money (to buy bigger memory cards).

(Yes, I am a college kid. No, it is impossible for me to get a job right now. My relatives will not let me use their cars.)

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