[gcompris-devel] Several PNG images are uncompressed and takes too much space, please fix this in new release

[F Wolff]

On Vr, 2008-05-09 at 16:11 +0300, Mantas Kriaučiūnas wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've found one bug in Gcompris, which is very easy to fix.
> PNG images are uncompressed in some boards and take too much space, for
> example "geography_country" board currently takes 5 MB space, but after
> compressing png files with pngcrush tool it takes only 0.9 MB !!! As 
> you see this is about 6 times smaller !!! 
> 
> Compressing these .png files will free the most space:
> 
> pngcrush -d new_canada/ geography_country/canada_region/*.png
> pngcrush -d new_brazil/ geography_country/brazil/*.png
> pngcrush -d new_turkey/ geography_country/turkey_district/*.png
> pngcrush -d new_misc/ gcompris/misc/*.png
> 
> please fix this before you release next version.
> I think the best solution would be running pngcrush before each release -
> this tool doesn't change images, which are already optimally compressed.

This is great! I wanted to make some geography activities for Africa,
but also didn't want to make the game too much bigger.

> 
> Also you can convert .wav files from boards/sounds and boards/sounds/melody
> into .ogg, this also would save more than 1 MB

If I remember correctly, .ogg files cause some unusable delays for the
interactive sounds on some platforms. Perhaps for the melodies they are
usable?


> OGG files in boards/music/ also are too big (more than 14 Mb) for 
> background music - I've recompressed these from original uncompressed 
> sources with oggenc (AFAIK I used -q3 or -q4 switch) and now they take 
> only 8 Mb, so 6 Mb saved !

I guess the interactive audio issues are not so problematic for
background music. 6 MB could be quite valuable!

> For same reasons it would be wise to use .jpg images for photos and other
> content, where high quality isn't important, for example for dog photos in
> boards/babyshapes/ or files boards/writing_tutor/wood*png
> 
> While hard disks are big these days, but most of Linux distors still are
> distributed through 700 Mb CD's, so every megabyte is important there
> Because of big Gcompris size it was excluded from Edubuntu CD, so, please
> make Gcompris package as small as possible and increase chances to 
> include Gcompris in Linux CD's

I can only agree with this. To install GCompris and the dependencies
which I don't yet have on my system now, I need 123MB of packages. I'm
on a small hard drive, and this feels like a bit big for me, especially
if I had to download it from here in South Africa. If we can make this
at all smaller, it would be really valuable.

GCompris on a diet! I like the idea...

Keep well
Friedel