Feature Request - Data compression

[enderandrew]

ScummVM supports many really old games that were stored on floppies and hardly take any space at all, but it also supports many FMV games of the CD-ROM era that take up tons of space because they relied on old audio and video formats that didn't compress efficiently.

Some might say that hard drives are cheap but ScummVM has been ported to a lot of devices where storage is more limited. My ScummVM folder is over 80 GB and that is not a negligible amount of data.

Suggestion 1:

So ScummVM has some tools that can re-encode data from various games. But you have to know which games you can re-encode data, which tool to use and the whole process is manual.

What I propose is a script that scans your added games and provides you with a list of games where ScummVM tools can compress data and generates batch files / scripts to do as such. For every game it can compress data, it will make a copy of the game, compress it and add it as a new copy of the game where you can test it. If the newly compressed version is working fine, you can then manually decide later to remove the larger/original version.

Suggestion 2:

Zip mounting. You could zip up your game data to save space and point ScummVM to a zip file instead of a folder.

[digitall]

Thanks, but a few points:
Feature requests should be added to the bug tracker if you want them to be looked at in future at bugs.scummvm.org

Suggestion 1, please see https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/User ... sion_Tools
Suggestion 2, please see this FAQ entry: https://www.scummvm.org/faq/#6_1

[enderandrew]

I can add #1 to the bug tracker. I'm aware that compression tools exist within ScummVM, but it is a very manual process. I wonder if users even know the tools exist. You have to compress files individually and know what you're doing. It would be nice if ScummVM offered to do this for supported games automatically.

As for not supporting zip files because of piracy, that makes no sense to me. Pirates can distribute a game as a zip file whether ScummVM needs a game to be extracted or loaded directly as a zip file. I'm not sure how refusing to add such a feature impacts piracy in any way.

[sev]

As for not supporting zip files because of piracy, that makes no sense to me. Pirates can distribute a game as a zip file whether ScummVM needs a game to be extracted or loaded directly as a zip file. I'm not sure how refusing to add such a feature impacts piracy in any way.

You are free to fork ScummVM with your own rules and approaches, as long as you comply with the GPL, e.g. publish full source code of your fork.

We will not work on automatic video compression for games. You're asking to spend hundreds of hours of development time with no obvious gain. Only relatively few people are so hardcore collectors as you obviously are, and keep 60GB of ScummVM-supported games. Most of such collections are coming from the pirate torrents.

So, please, do not waste your time on filing that feature request. Of course, we will be glad to accept patches which implement such video compression.


Eugene