File compression support
A Windows tool for writing images to USB sticks or SD/CF cards
Brought to you by:
gruemaster,
tuxinator2009
Oh yes PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!
Those images are eating SOOO much space.
If you use any compression library at the lowest setting it will most likely remove the empty areas of the img file without trying to compress the actual data which would make it really fast and solve the problem for most of us.
Last edit: tcz8 2014-04-11
I'm going to sadly postpone this until the next release. The good news is that the program now has an option to stop at the end of the partitioned space, meaning if your 8G device only has a 2G partition, your image should only be 2G. Not the best, but it helps.
I am looking into file compression as well, while keeping the code base small. Adding outside libraries adds a lot of overhead to the build, as I have to snapshot external libraries. I want to experiment with QT's built in zlib compression to see if it is semi-compatible with gzip on a file compression level, as that would require the least amount of work and benefit the majority of the user base.
I would propose an implentation of XZ compression with the ability to choose compression dictionary size and word size with the ability to choose multiple threas.
This would be extreemly usefull since XZ is the most compressionable format out there and would make the file fill less.
Best regards and thank you for reading this
Darkyere
I just came to suggest this. Shame it's been on the list for 6 years but hasn't made it into the program yet :-(
I implemented gzip compression in a fork of this tool (https://github.com/bizplay/win32-disk-imager) which is a command line version.
It can create and read a .gz file. So it can do even more than Etcher which can only read .gz files.
It should not be that hard to implement this code also in win32diskimager since the code to read/write the image is almost the same.
I do not use the mingw compiler (I use MS visual studio) so I am not able to adapt win32diskimager but I am willing to share the code so that someone can implement this.
Note that my code is derived from the gzip code itself so I use all source codes and no libraries so it should surely be possible to compile this also with the mingw compiler.
I think this would be a great addition to this tool.
Let me know if interested.