#you have to rely on the author's blessing to extract rar files

[enarei]

STOP USING RAR

rigorous discussion about comic book file formats ensuing on the manga piracy subreddit last night. I've taken the side that CBR is flawed and the only reason people continue to use it is because they're unfamiliar with the spec. there isn't a lot to know about this subject because there's very little public facing information surrounding the creation of these file formats, which originated with a program called CDisplay (that is now dead, sort of, which is a shame for how influential it has been), but at the same time, the practical information that we have available from using them is very straightforward: CBZ, CBR, CB7 and so on are different file extensions for zip, RAR, or 7z archives respectively. that's essentially it. the extension does a lot to obfuscate to most people that the "obscure" manga format they downloaded from some shady pirate website, is literally just a folder of images that has been compressed, and it's trivial to rename the file and inflate it to see its contents individually (there's a neverending stream of stupid questions relating to this).

imo this variety of options does more harm than good, because you see, the pages, the images (jpeg, gif, png, though some readers also support webp), are already as compressed as they can be, so the efficiency of the program used to create the archive does not matter – if you've ever tried to zip a folder made up only of videos or images and saw that the file size barely shrinked, if at all, that's because ironically, these file formats are already pretty damn efficiently compressed. often the compression step of the archival process is completely disabled because it only slows the time it takes to open the finished archive.

so as a format intended for media distribution, specially often bootleg, user contributed distribution on the web, you'd think CBZ should be the ubiquitous standard, as zip, regardless of its compression efficiency compared to newer algorithms, remains the standard compression utility, it's installed on literally every machine that can display images, including ones with more restrictive software limitations.

but for some reason some fucks keep sharing archives made with 7zip and WinRAR!!!! which is like. idk. it's like purposefully sharing someone's music in much more convoluted notation from what everyone else uses when there's no practical benefit to do so, and continuing doing it after someone has asked you not to and told you that is not standard. it's proprietary software that is not even useful for what people typically use it for (distributing already compressed media online!), cuz you don't get any benefit from it, it just limits the type of devices and number of hoops you have to jump through to open it. it's one of those salient points about how even mild tech illiteracy and ignorance about pernicious licensing in popular freeware software can have meaningful repercussions to media preservation. Windows users not knowing know they don't need to install an external utility to compress files has popularized CBRs to the point I've had to argue with people that wrongly assume they're the standard used in digital comics publishing.