Release: psvtrimmer lets you reduce the size of your .psv files
We argued when psvgamesd was released that a few things would prevent it from becoming the standard psv backup format for now. One of these limitations was the size of the dumps, which several developers have been working on addressing recently. Pez2k is one of these devs and has released a beta version of psvtrimmer for Windows.
A low hanging fruit to reduce the format size is to trim the zeroes in the file: the current dumping mechanism copies the entire cartridge, meaning it dumps the entire size of the cart including a bunch of empty bytes, not only the game that’s on it. removing the zeroes at the extremity of the backup is an operation that does not impact the dump while making it much smaller.
PSVtrimmer will let you cut the size of your .psv dumps without impacting your games. According to the developer, this is still a beta and he is looking for feedback on functionality.
Other tools exist such as psvtrim by kageurufu, a tool in python. Arguably, building such a tool is not extremely difficult so you might find a trimmer in the language of your choice (or for the platform of your choice) very soon, if you don’t decide to create your own.
The full announce from the dev:
Since the open-source .psv format for storing images of your Vita gamecards was unveiled last week, the main gripe with the format seems to have been that by default it includes all of the blank space on the card as part of the image. Since the algorithm to trim the image down to only the pertinent data is so simple, I’ve knocked together a quick application that does so.
This is just a first test version, with room for future QOL updates like a progress bar, and future features like restoring a trimmed image back to its full size. For now though, it just trims, as that seems to be the most demanded option. I’m more interested in whether it works currently than whether it’s a friendly, idiot-proofed tool.
I’ll pretty much copy the release notes below for any other details:
This software has not been extensively tested as I only own two cards, so no warranty is provided. I strongly suggest that it should only be run on copies of your original images initially until you verify that it has worked correctly.
Currently no progress bar is displayed, so you may have to wait up to several minutes for the process to complete. However, during local testing (with an i7 CPU and mechanical HDD) the tool takes approximately one second per 100 MB of data to be trimmed.
All credit for the .PSV file format goes to Motoharu Gosuto, Yifan Lu, and devnoname120. I am providing this tool for archival use only. No guarantee is provided that any existing or future implementations of other .PSV tools support the use of trimmed images.
Requires .NET Framework 4.6.
Ultimately of course, the most convenient way would be for the dumper on the PSVita to handle the trimming at the source. in the meantime, this will probably be very useful to help popularize the format.
Download psvtrimmer
You can download psvtrimmer from the developer’s github here.
Source: pez2k on /talk
Beautiful
nice =) i would love to try this tool today 🙂
how do i use .PSV format in ps vita
google the same question, bro
will it reduce loading time, like cso file on psp?
cso didn’t reduce loading times, it is compressed and actually takes longer with compression level 9 for example.
Also this area with all the zeros never get accessed in a game as it contains no content.
The only benefit is saving of space.
I’m assuming not, but would there be a size difference between a trimmed .psv and a raw nonpdrm rip?
The .psv will likely always be a bit bigger as there’s a little bit of metadata included (about 0.5kb) and any small spaces between files are preserved, but that’s what makes it the better format for archival. Comparing a straight dump of the individual files to a trimmed .psv for my test gamecard is 3.29 GB vs 3.39 GB – not a huge difference considering the .psv is more futureproof.
GOOD QUESTION
Thanks for the article wololo – yes, for me it’s about popularising the format, it’s the right way to go so if I can help its adoption then that’s great.
Glad you mentioned kageurufu’s tool too – his is currently a bit more feature-complete than mine if you don’t mind using the command line.
oh! thanks for the python script!