I did some experiments regarding the soundtrack of the game:
@ present all files are encoded using ogg, but many of them used different bitrates when encoding.
Most of the files are encoded using CBR (constant bit rate).
During some tests I managed to reduce the filesize needed massively, without reducing the quality.
Here one example:
Reencoding the music from CBR to VBR, when using ABR-quality -1, that means reencoding files with 128 CBR to 112 VBR for example, with a upper limit of 160 VBR reduced the filesize for the music from 219 MB to 189 MB (!).
But we could do even better reduction, when we define the upper limit with 128 VBR.
Reducing the filesize of the tracks would also help in reducing loading-speed a little bit & would help us to optimize the way content of the game is stored.
Backups of the original encodings should be made in case the original is needed again.
If developers want I can optimize the reencoding & prepare a patch.
Do not misunderstand me: I do not want to trade quality against size here, but keep the quality as high as possible, but the filesize reasonable & optimized...
Why should we use 300Kilobit per second for silence ?
Additional Info (2010-04-16): When I am talking about upper limits here, I am meaning the upper limits for the average bitrate, not for the highest bitrate, so upper limit of 128 VBR means:
32 KBit Minimum, 128 KBit Average, 224 KBit Maximum
[FYI, to avoid misunderstandings]