[vlc-devel] Re: Download size

TwoTailedFox twotailedfox at gmail.com
Fri Aug 12 23:44:28 CEST 2005


If my knowledge of NSIS is correct, it can be configured to download
files from selected options seperately from a web location. This can
possibly be used for the IE/Mozilla Plugins, and the Language Locales.

On 8/12/05, Clément Stenac <zorglub at diwi.org> wrote:
> 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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> 
> 


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