Thank you for this new improvement and for continuing to support the old format
*Wilfredo Rodríguez* El lun., 28 de sep. de 2020 a la(s) 04:52, Emmanuel Engelhart ( [email protected]) escribió: > Hi > > The ZIM format relies on third party compression algorithms to provide > the best user experience. This means, high compression level, quick > decompression, high portability, etc. Overtime the ZIM has used gzip, > bzip2 and since almost 10 years the lzma2 version of the xz library. > > Time to time new modern compression algorithms are created and we use to > evaluate them to see if this would bring a significant improvement for > our users. Usually it would not be worth the effort of switching, but > this has been different in the case of Zstandard (zstd). > > The key advantage is that zstd offers a higher decompression speed for a > similar (to lzma) compression ratio. That means articles are displayed > even quicker than before and the energy consumption is a lot less. You > can read the whole discussion at > https://github.com/openzim/libzim/issues/84. > > The decision of switching from lzma to xz has been made earlier this > year and actually most of our Kiwix ports have been able to read zstd > based ZIM files since more than a quarter. We are approaching now the > end of the transition stage for Kiwix readers and therefore we will soon > (during October) start to publish ZIM files using the new compression zstd. > > For 99% of the users this move will be totally transparent and they > should only notice the reading/searching speed-up. For the 1% left a few > things have to be considered: > * If you can not read a new ZIM file, please update to the latest > version of your (Kiwix) reader (this is always a good advice). > * For all non Kiwix readers, but still libzim based, these readers > should be re-compiled/re-released with the latest libzim. > * For users relying on ZIM files but not on the libzim/Kiwix software > stack, the software needs to be fixed. > > We don't plan so far to discontinued the support of lzma compression > algorithm even if we discouraged to use it as zstd is simply always > better. Older ZIM files are still perfectly readable, and this won't > change in the next couple of years. > > Regards > Emmanuel > > -- > Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more > * Web: https://kiwix.org/ > * Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline > * Wiki: https://wiki.kiwix.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > Offline-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l >
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