Difference between revisions of "OpenTasks"

OpenTasks (view source)

Revision as of 21:42, 4 March 2007

1,111 bytes added , 21:42, 4 March 2007

→‎Tools: Overhaul the compression tools

Fingolfin

1,079

edits

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 === Tools: Overhaul the compression tools ===
-<font color="magenta">TODO</font>
+We offer a multitude of command line tools in a separate packages (scummvm-tools).
+The majority of these tools are used to (re)compress audio data. This greatly helps users who want to play their games on devices with limited storage, like PDAs and smart phones.
-to share more code / share it
+The user can choose between MP3, Ogg Vorbis and (in those cases where it makes sense) FLAC compression. The tools take the original data files, extract sound data, compress them, and reassemble everything into new (smaller) data files.
-better / to compress by using suitable compression libs instead of
-calling external binaries (thus allowing more in-memory operations etc.)
+There are various ways in which these tools could be improved:
+* Write a portable GUI for them -- that's a big task and hence has it's own section (see below)
+* Unify their command line interfaces
+* Unify the actual compression code -- some partial work on this exists, but with a crude ad-hoc API, which makes it very difficult to use them and also inefficient
+* Right now, compression works by invoking external encoder binaries (oggenc, lame, flac). To this end we write data into a temporary file, invoke the external encoder, and read back the file it created. It would be nice if one could instead link against suitable encoder libraries, and provide compression binaries which are fully self-contained. Also this would make it possible to perform in-memory compression (which could provide a noticable speedup).
 === Tools: Write a portable GUI for the tools ===