.ogg Compression in the .pbo file

[Tyger]

What are the pros and cons of .ogg compression in the mymission.pbo file?

I have a Beta mission that is ~17 Mb because of the large selection of music I have offered in the mission. Does compression reduce the size of this file then? What are the side effects?

[THobson]

I am not sure what you mean.  You can save the ogg files at different levels of compression - and hence different quality levels.  I us the dbAmp default for music but for voices I use less compression - lower quality is harder to detect with music.  Then the whole lot ends up in a pbo  and then if you zip it there is an additional small reduction in size.  Ogg files seem to be much smaller than wss or wav files.

I don't know if any of this helps

[Tyger]

Oh, yes. I knew that ;D

I suppose I should embelish a little more. I have been using Amafali's MakePBO v1.5 to create my mission.pbo so that I could edit the mission.sqm right before I packaged it. No addon conflicts then.   In the 'Properties' box, you can check which files you want to leave uncompressed. One of the options is .oggs. I have ~10-12 meg of music and sound in one of my missions that I would like to compress for file space.

goto "Return to original question" ;D

[THobson]

Oh, yes. I knew that

I thought you must - that is why I was puzzled.  I only answered because I saw it was getting no attention.

I don't know the answer to your specific question, but my experience of compressing files that are already compressed is that you gain little if anything.

This strikes me as the sort of thing Mikero would know

[Planck]

I think with any pbo that has its elements compressed there is extra work involved for the game to do.

It would have to uncompress anything in the pbo that it was needing to use.

Uncompressed pbo's do not 'strain' the game engine this way.   ;D


Planck

[h-]

IIRC it was Suma or Maruk who said you should not compress (with pbo compression) the *.ogg files because it will infact increase their file size...

[Tyger]

Well, in that case then bloody well never mind ;D

[Baddo]

IIRC it was Suma or Maruk who said you should not compress (with pbo compression) the *.ogg files because it will infact increase their file size...

I recall that too. Based on the fact that OGG is already compressed, not much good can be done to it by trying to compress it more. A quick test using MakePBO 1.1 for a 98 KB OGG file gives me a PBO of 109 KB (compressing OGG files on). With WinRAR I get 97 KB and with Windows XP I get 97 KB.

So what's the profit if compressing OGG results in OFP having to do extra work with the file and there is no compression but you get bigger PBO's?

Leave them uncompressed.

Instead - like THobson is explaining - I would bring the quality of the OGG files down to a level where ingame sound quality is still acceptable. You can get significant file size drops and still keep most of the 'hearable' quality of your sounds.

[Tyger]

Okay. Thanks for the info. I'll see what I can do. I'll try almost anything to get my 12 megs of music down to more managable sizes, albeit without deleteing them.

[h-]

Gladly Ogg Vorbis is insanely good compared to mp3 (in my own small-winded tests) so you can 'crush' the sound file to pretty low bitrate before it starts to sound horrible...

Unlike mp3 which does that when it goes below 300..
(IMHO all 'lossless' (abhorrent word) audio compression should be banned and condemned to Hell... OT, I know.. ;D)

[Tyger]

Yes, I use Ogg Vorbis myself.  

Kool d00ds. Thanks for the help. I'll see what I can do then...