XnView Software

In case you're not familiar with them, .cbr files are a file format for reading scanned comic books, or any other collection of images - magazines, game manuals, etc... A .cbr file is actually just a .rar file renamed so that it's associated with its appropriate viewer application instead of WinRAR (there's also .cbz's and .cbt's, renamed from zips and tars, respectively).

I discovered that XnView will display thumbnails for .cbr files if the following conditions are met:
1) the first file in the archive has to be a .jpg
2) the first file can't have any compression applied to it
Under those conditions, XnView treats the .cbr file just like a .jpg, or "JPEG based file" to be precise. This is great because it allows me to view my entire collection's covers, like so...



See? Those are all renamed .rar files, each holding about 23 .jpgs and weighing in around 15MB. But because of the conditions I outlined, XnView displays the covers - which are generally the first file in the archive. If you view the .cbr in Hex, you'll see that the JPEG header comes right after the RAR header, which I guess XnView just ignores? Well regardless, it's frickin' sweet to have this capability, and it's just as fast as making thumbs for normal .jpgs (there are some apps that generate .cbr thumbails by un-Rarring each archive and then grabbing the first image....Yikes!).

But here's the thing...ever since I upgraded to XnView 1.91, I'm no longer able to scroll through my .cbr files in Fullscreen. Normally I could view the image Fullscreen and then PgDn or mouse-scroll to the next one, but now instead of the next image, I just get a black screen. It works fine in the non-fullscreen Viewer mode, though, so maybe it's just a minor code fix?

Secondly, the Shell Extension won't display anything for .cbr files. It should be able to display anything XnView does, right? Could there be some way to add custom extensions for the ShellEx to display? Or possibly ShellEx could read the Custom Formats defined in the XnView's File List options? It would be nice to view a comic's cover simply by right-clicking on it.

Thanks for listening to me ramble.

It's quite probable that it ISN'T xnview which is displaying the thumbs for those CBRs. As I posted in some thread of xnview's zip support, xnview on my syustem will display a thumb for cbr/z files, but not for the exact same file if I simply rename it to rar/zip (which i found extremely odd because xnview can open rar/zip files, but can't open the exact same file if I rename it to cbr/z). As it turns out, if I set my explorer folders to thumbnail mode, the exact same thumbs show up in windows (without xnview). In my case, it's clear that it was some other program which was producing the thumbs, and xnview was somehow just tapping into that prog. It's quite likely that the same thing is happening to you.

It's probably because you disabled 'recognize only by extension'.