Does Alcohol use compression in its images?
I don't think it does, because I have found that when I store images on compressed NTFS volumes, the images usually end up with a noticable differece in size. I did some experimenting with an MDF image of my Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 cd from work, and I found the following:
Compression type: Rate:
Normal NTFS: 26%
Maximum ZIP: 39%
Maximum RAR: 45%!!!
These are some pretty significant compression rates...! I realize that other cd's may not compress as much, but then again others might compress more... Either way, this still presents an outstanding example of what compression could do for Alcohol users.
For instance, if a user had something like 12 ~500 MB image files on his system, and could reclaim 25% of that space with compression... That's 1.5 GB of reclaimed space...! Maybe more if higher compression is used. Imagine if Alcohol used RAR compression for a "high compression" setting... 3 GB might be recovered if 50% compression could be attained...
If the user is an IT professional for a company (such as myself) and had many more image files (one of my previous employers had hundreds of software titles on user desktops), that adds up to a LOT of wasted space... Who knows - 10, 20 maybe even 50 GB...!
So that is my feature request - add user-selectable compression to the images. I was thinking somthing with minimal controls like a simple slider-bar with four settings like this:
Compression: Reason:
None (self-explanatory)
Light (why waste space if you don't have to)
Medium (good balance of space and speed for games)
High (squash that baby like an armadillo on a texas interstate) :-)
Thanks
Edited by spinjector, 04 September 2003 - 04:12 AM.
