7Zip or other Archive Support

[moonscapex]

Having Archive support in Rockbox would be very useful (for theme installation and other things).
After doing some research, I found these projects that sounded the easiest to port:
Info-Zip
Ported to many, many platforms with processors similair to Rockbox Players.
Source: http://ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/
Website: http://www.info-zip.org/
7-Zip
Ported to only a few platforms, ARM port is available for WinCe that might be ported to the Rockbox ARM players.  Supports many archive formats.
Website: http://www.7-zip.org/

I am not a C programmer so I don't know if there is much I can do to help but if someone could take a look, that would be great .

Thanks,
Will

[saratoga]

You mean a 7zip plugin?  Why would you ever want to use 7zip on an MP3 player?

[torne]

7zip's code is scary and fairly difficult to port.

A viewer plugin that can unzip .zip is not unreasonable, though (infozip is nice and easy to do and is under a BSDlike license), but I'm not going to do it

[NorTheBear]

An unzip viewer plugin which is capable of handling password-protected zip archives makes sense to me. There have been similar posts in the past (see http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=17736).
It would add some useful functionality to protect private data (texts and photo galleries) of Rockbox users. Just think about thefts and losses.

[mkoenig]

I dont know if this could ever work. Taking the memory consumption caused by the dictionary for compression/decompression into account, only files compressed using very small dictionaries will work on the current players. Plugins dont have that much memory available to them (512kb max iirc) and that just is not enough i believe.

[torne]

The default 7zip LZMA dictionary size limit is 16MB, so you only need ~17-18MB to decompress that - you could get it by stealing the audio buffer on most targets. Plugins can use more than the 512kb plugin buffer if they stop playback.

It still won't work on targets with less memory, of course, or on archives with larger dictionaries...