This might be a reason to move gunzipping request support into Play - it'd be nice to have more control over it.  Though, we currently don't have a deflate enumeratee - though HTTP deflate is zlib, which sits on top of the deflate compression algorithm.  gzip also sits on top of the deflate compression algorithm.  The only different between the two is the headers/footers they use.  So it shouldn't be hard to implement a deflate enumeratee, the code will look very similar to the gzip enumeratee.