7zip provides superior compression, allowing longer runs to be submitted, and free and open-source 7zip compressors and decompressors are available for all platforms.
Is it just too much work to reconfigure NESVideoAgent to unpack .7z files in order to calculate the movie length and possibly produce screenshots from local versions of the ROMs, like it does now with submitted .zip files?
7zip provides superior compression, allowing longer runs to be submitted, and free and open-source 7zip compressors and decompressors are available for all platforms.
Is it just too much work to reconfigure NESVideoAgent to unpack .7z files in order to calculate the movie length and possibly produce screenshots from local versions of the ROMs, like it does now with submitted .zip files?
There's are no standardized tools for handling 7z files on the Linux platform.
In contrast, info-zip's "unzip" is widely available and considered standard.
This problem leads to the fact that adding a particular 7z program dependency makes the nesvideos_site harder to port, and to the fact that for Linux users like me, it's always a hassle handling 7z files because I need to figure out what program to handle it with.
Plain LZMA compression on the other hand, is fine. Maybe we should do .tar.lzma? ;)
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Bisqwit, on Debian, install p7zip-full, and then use the "7za" program.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
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Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Bisqwit wrote:
Nach wrote:
Bisqwit, on Debian, install p7zip-full, and then use the "7za" program.
Thing is, I also use Gentoo and Fedora.
For your servers???
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Bisqwit wrote:
Nach wrote:
Bisqwit wrote:
Nach wrote:
Bisqwit, on Debian, install p7zip-full, and then use the "7za" program.
Thing is, I also use Gentoo and Fedora.
For your servers???
For computers. I access the tasvideos site on computers, you know.
Yes, but the site needing to decompress runs on a server I imagine.
And personally, all my computers these days are servers ;)
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
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Bisqwit wrote:
Plain LZMA compression on the other hand, is fine. Maybe we should do .tar.lzma? ;)
I wouldn't think that.
They've been discussing changing the LZMA format bundled with 7z.
The LZMA format produced by these utilities is also different than the one currently produced by 7z (as well as supposedly being superior).
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
The point is still the same: I mean it's hard enough to port the current dependencies, and the site will need to be in new hands soon, so it's best to keep the difficulties to a minimum.
I guess the other idea that I had was that this might be like the move from avi to mkv for publications, from the old and familiar to a better format.
Also, to go along with Bisqwit's facetious suggestion, it would be easier to just do LZMA compression without putting the movie file in a TAR because per the guidelines only one file can be in the archive anyway, so we don't need to package several files together (which is the sole purpose of TAR).
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arflech wrote:
so we don't need to package several files together (which is the sole purpose of TAR).
I've seen people distribute single files (UNIX executables) in TAR format, just to preserve the execute bit.
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That's why we now need to use self extracting 7-Zip files. So Windows users can extract them without needing any programs, and be horribly mortified and scared by the .exe, and UNIX users can just use 7za to extract self extracting 7-Zip exe files.
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So for bin based movies you gonna put extra size, just for the self decompression system?
What i mean basicly is the benefit belong first to text based movie, and even in that case zip already do a good job on them
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arukAdo wrote:
So for bin based movies you gonna put extra size, just for the self decompression system?
7z even with the self extracting code can very likely end up smaller than a comparative zip file.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Windows XP (90% of players?) read nativly Zip, he cant 7-zip tought (without extra software)
We also need extra software to view or make input files, or even to watch the new MKVs, and tbqh 7zip is more ubiquitous than that.
Also self-extracting archives are a bad idea, both because of the extra size and because lots of people are leery of downloading random .exe files...and because these archives would not open so easily in Linux.
This is generally very true. However, I just tested compressing the largest movie files available, and 7zip showed surprisingly little advantage over the regular zip. For example:
bloobiebla-oot.m64, 2.36 MB, 7zip: 81 kB, zip: 96 kB
erokky-ffvi.smv, 1.7 MB, 7zip: 19 kB, zip: 16 kB (!)
I also tried to compress a bunch of movie files at once, namely bloobiebla-oot.m64, deign-ff4.smv, erokky-ffvi.smv, gunty-lufia2.smv and samuraigoroh-ff5.smv, amounting to 8 MB. 7zip: 158 kB, zip: 170 kB.
The difference in compression is rather small. In a few cases 7zip surprisingly compresses less than regular zip.
So is it worth the trouble?
Bisqwit, on Debian, install p7zip-full, and then use the "7za" program.
Thing is, I also use Gentoo and Fedora.
For your servers???
Ran Gentoo for several on my server, never had the slightest problem.
Nach wrote:
That's why we now need to use self extracting 7-Zip files. So Windows users can extract them without needing any programs, and be horribly mortified and scared by the .exe, and UNIX users can just use 7za to extract self extracting 7-Zip exe files.
Thank God I can spot irony every once in a while. A little part (possibly even a big one) died inside of me when reading this. While I already can't stand having win32 emulators, this is just too much sucking up to M$.
Bisqwit: emerge p7zip
[00:31:12] <stickie> by the way, thanks for the sig sixofour
[00:31:23] <sixofour> dejavu
[00:31:25] <sixofour> what sig?
[00:31:55] <stickie> you will just have to find out *insert mystical music*
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7-Zip isn't very much used, and I'm not trying to steer anyone wrong or anything, but when I use it to store my programs and stuff, some of the program files I put in these archives actually bloat! Is it me or did the 7z file gain a few extra megabytes?
