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Sorry I haven't read all posts of this thread but can someone answer these questions for me?
1. What's the best tool to quickly compress isos compatible with pcsx2?
2. How long will it take to compress 500 ps2 games about 1TB size?
3. Any rough idea how much space I can save by compressing those 500 games?

Thanks.

(07-18-2015, 08:29 PM)prafull Wrote: [ -> ]Sorry I haven't read all posts of this thread but can someone answer these questions for me?
1. What's the best tool to quickly compress isos compatible with pcsx2?
2. How long will it take to compress 500 ps2 games about 1TB size?
3. Any rough idea how much space I can save by compressing those 500 games?

Thanks.

I cant speak for gzipping them, but for CSO:

1. maxcso commandline utility works well for me
2. takes a good while, but you can use the batch file i posted above to do it as quick as possible. Note that some games might stop working when compressed, although this is usually games which are meant to be in cue/bin format, so avoid those.
3. Compression varies depending on how full the iso's really are and how much is dummy files, my 300ish games which weighed in at about 700-800gb shrank down to just over 500gb.

@Prafull
I'd use pigz it's command line only but work's very well and it's fast, I've posted it below as well as a bat file code to do all your iso's. If you want to do other than iso just change the code extention I compressed 80 iso's and saved 100 gig, so it can be conciderable savings. Time varies; but around 45 sec to 130 per iso

(07-09-2015, 11:30 AM)omnikam Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for the pigz tip, it uses all my cores and compresses in around 30-60 sec per Iso
Now a tip for some of you that would like to Automate the process somewhat
1 Put All your Ps2 iso files in a folder, This folder should ONLY contain Ps2 iso`s
2 Put pigz.exe in same folder as Ps2 iso`s
3 create a bat file and paste the following into it (new text doccument with extention changed to bat)

Code:

for /r %%i in (*.iso) do (
pigz -9 "%%i")

4 double click bat to start, it will go through every iso in the folder and at maximin compression convert and delete the original iso. If you want to keep the original iso then chang the bat to this

Code:

for /r %%i in (*.iso) do (
pigz -k -9 "%%i")

Yeah Pigz is WAY faster than 7-Zip at compressing Gzip files. 7-Zip doesn't use multiple threads for some reason. But prafull, keep in mind that 7-Zip's Ultra compression level does compress better than Pigz does. Check out my post on the subject:
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-New-ISO-c...#pid432131

EDIT: Consequently, that's why I don't use Pigz. I wish I could but I need as much space as I can get and with the amount of ISO files I have, every little bit counts. avih, you think you'll ever implement bzip2? I'd love to be able to compress to that since 7-Zip gives me the option to use multiple threads during that compression process.

refraction: Can we compare notes on some games? I wanna get a better idea on which compression method is better. I might convert my lib from gzip to cso XD

(07-19-2015, 08:47 AM)karasuhebi Wrote: [ -> ]avih, you think you'll ever implement bzip2? I'd love to be able to compress to that since 7-Zip gives me the option to use multiple threads during that compression process.

I can't tell the future and currently there are no such plans. If I had to guess - probably not.

Why not? You mentioned it in the OP, giving me hope. XD Is it difficult to implement like .7z?

I gziped all my games, some do not load when in gzip format? Goes to black screen, however if I unzip them to ISO they work? I am not sure why. The other thing I noticed is, some do not work.. then if you try later they do work? Seems odd.. using the above version 1.3.0.0-git

Which program did you use to compress them? Do you get any errors in PCSX2 when you try loading them?

http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-GZIP-Problems

Here is a thread I started.. some GZIP not working, but work when unzipped?

Quote:refraction
funny enough i did exactly this last night! although I'm using maxcso, i did the following so it deletes the original too

Code:

@ECHO OFF
FOR %%I IN (*.iso) DO (
 maxcso "%%I"
 DEL "%%I"
)

This is a bit of an older comment now, but I was looking for info on a reported issue with CSO and came across this.

Just a note on this - maxcso's default mode is meant for a balance in compatibility and compression.

For PS2 ISOs, I'd recommend the following:

maxcso --block=16384 "%%I"

This will compress better and may even complete compression faster.  Furthermore, maxcso runs the blocks against zlib and 7-zip's deflate for best compression.  If you would rather it completes faster, you can use:

maxcso --fast --block=16384 "%%I"

If on the other hand, you don't care about how long it takes, and you want to save more bytes, use the following:

maxcso --use-zopfli --block=16384 "%%I"

Emphasis on "don't care how long it takes."  Zopfli is very slow.  Expect maybe an additional 1% smaller compression at best.

If you've used maxcso without arguments already, maxcso can compress a cso without decompressing it first.  However, it cannot do it "in place" with the same filename - it must create a brand new file for the new compression settings.

In many cases using a compressed ISO (gz or CSO) can result in better performance because:
* Your operating system can cache a greater % of the file in memory.  Decompression is generally very quick (especially for CSO), so this can reduce the chances of hitting disk IO.
 * Your operating system may read ahead in files when caching, which again can cache more resulting bytes of data with compression.
 * Disk and memory access locality can improve, since often games have padding between individual files or similar (padding compresses well.)

In general, as long as the decompression is efficient, the trade-off between less disk access and some decompression overhead is usually very good and a no-brainer.  Even using an SSD, performance may be better with compressed ISOs.

If anyone experiences blue screens or errors with CSOs that do not appear using the original ISOs, or while using maxcso, please let me know.  This should never happen.  Aside from Mode2 CD ISOs (most PS2 games are DVD), the CSO support should work with all games.  Mode2 is not supported because it makes ISOs a size that isn't aligned to 2048 bytes (ISO sector size), which is currently required by CSO.

-[Unknown]