Kodi has a Nice Feature in that it apparently understand how to properly unpack certain types of archives, e.g. .rar and .zip archives, on the fly which is to say that it just appears to unpack these things in memory, and never actually unpacks them to disk.
As I say, this is a swell feature, however…
It also appears to me that when and if one is using Kodi and one happens to browse into a directory that contains such an archive file, or several of them, Kodi will automatically. and without any special prompting, proceed to try to perform this on the fly archive unpacking on any and all such archive files within the directory in question, apparently in anticipation of the possibility that the user may soon try to browse into one of these archive files. I will call this “agressive archive unpacking“.
In many cases, this agressive archive unpacking on Kodi’s part is helpful, in that it dramatically reduces that lag time the user will encounter when and if he/she does in fact try to browse into one of the archive files in question. That’s the good news. That bad news is that if the user browses into a directory that happens to contain one or more large archive files, then even if the user had no intention of browsing into any of those archive files, Kodi’s agressive archive unpacking “feature” may result in a substantial lag time, before anything else can be done, just as a result of browsing into the directory containing thelarge archive file(s). (This appears to be an effect that I personally have witnessed anway, and it is actually rather annoying.)
So, my question is simple and obvious: Is there any way to instruct Kodi to perform archive unpacking in a more “lazy” way, i.e. only unpacking any given archive file when and if an attempt is made, by the user, to actually browse into the specific archive file in question?
If not, then please consider this as a feature request. It would be Nice to have a little radio button (in Settings) that would allow the user to disable Kodi’s (over-)agressive automatic archive unpacking (which it appears to always do upon entry into any directory containing archive files) and which would instead instruct Kodi to be “lazy” about archive unpacking, i.e. only unpacking any individual archive file when and if the user actually tries to browse into it.
P.S. Any such new Kodi optional setting might also perhaps be of benefit to those users who are using Kodi on platforms with very limited main memory.
P.P.S. If such an option already exists in Kodi, and I just missed noticing it, well then nevermind!