[vlc-devel] Download size

[Clément Stenac]

Hello,

VLC packages sizes have steadily increased over the last few years:
http://clement.stenac.org/projects/videolan/download.jpg

While this is generally normal and acceptable, as VLC features have
enlarged, this is a trend that we should try to fit.

VLC remains quite lighter than most of its (proprietary) "competitors",
but that difference is getting lower and lower, ... whereas it could be
a good point for VLC.

Most notably, from a few experiments I made, it appears that by removing
the mozilla and IE plugins from the main win32 package, we could reduce
its size by more than 40%. That's really a great improvement that could
put us under the 5MB threshold.

I think distributing these plugins as separate packages would be
beneficial, as many people don't use them, and distributing both IE and
FF plugins might not be very useful.

Another thing is the osdmenu that was recently added. It adds more than
2MB of png images, which lead to an increase of more than 500K. At the
moment, the menu is not really usable by end users and I guess it won't
be enabled yet so it's not yet a problem, but it will become one if the
images are included. I think we could distribute the images sets as
separate packages too (dionoea is working on a packages
distribution/search system that could allow users to download such
add-on packages from within vlc).

The locales (in the zip package) need about 800Ko... Having
language-specific packages could reduce them by about 650K, but that
would make quite a burden IMHO.

Apart from these big points, the fact is that it's quite hard to fight
this size increase. VLC depends on more and more libs (1), which are
often big. (For example, two recently added plugins, libxml and gnutls
represent more than 1MB).

There had been discussions about the possibility to enable
mostly-builtins in our binary releases (or at least to turn some "core"
modules that users probably don't want to change, like the audio
converturs and stuff like that into builtins) to get rid of part of the
shared object overhead, I don't remember exactly what had been decided
and what had been done.

-- 
Clément

(1) A recent study showed that the VLC debian package is the package
that depends on the greatest number of libraries

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