minuimus.pl

Minuimus is a file optimiser utility script: You point it at a file, and it makes the file smaller without compromising the file contents. File optimisers are able to do this using a variety of file-specfic optimisations, most of which involve decompressing data within a compressed file and recompressing it in a more efficient manner. The process could be compared directly to extracting a ZIP file, then recompressing it at the most demanding setting. It uses many of the same techniques used by other optimisers such as Papa's Best Optimizer.

The latest version is Minuimus 4.1.

If running on Windows, the bundled windows dependencies will also be required.

Minuimus itsself does not carry out all of this optimisation alone. It is dependent upon many other utilities for this, as well as some more specialised methods developed especially for it. Minuimus is a script which automates the process of calling upon all of these utilities, including the process of recursively processing container files and ensuring proper reassembly, detecting and handling the various errors that may occur, and of running some level of integrity checking upon the optimised files to prevent damage.

Minuimus's optimisations are, by default, completely transparent: Not a single pixel of an image will be changed in value, no audio or video will fall in quality. Even metadata is preserved unaltered. It also supports a number of forms of lossy optimisation, which must be explicitly enabled by command line option.

This optimisation isn't actually lossless, strictly speaking, because may delete some essentially-useless information within files such as edit history in PDFs. But it's pretty close. The important information is all preserved, if you use the default settings.

As Minuimus entirely automates the file optimisation process, nothing more is needed than to install the prerequsites and run a single command to point Minuimus at the files to be optimised. It will optimise those files it can, and skip over those it cannot.

Minuimus consists of a perl script and three supporting (optional) binaries which are used for the processing of PDF, WOFF and SWF files. These are written for use on Ubuntu Linux, but should be adaptable to other Linux distributions with little if any alteration. Minuimus will also work on Windows using Strawberry Perl, but has not been subjected to as much testing. These utilities are released under the GPL v3 license, as is Minuimus itsself.

Minuimus goes beyond just calling on AdvanceCOMP. When faced with files which are zip containers - such as zip, epub, or docx - it will extract these files, recursively process all of the files contained within them, and put them back together. In this manner it can make e-books and office documents substantially smaller.

Use it to make your website faster, your game easier to distribute, or just to squeeze more pointless holiday photographs on to your computer. It's written on ubuntu linux, but should be adaptable to other distributions. This is a very capable program, as it is able to achieve an ongoing saving in storage and transmission with no cost beside a one-time need for some processor time.

The exact space saving achieved by this level of file optimisation is highly dependent upon the file being optimised. As is expected for any file optimiser, even after extensive testing, the results are too inconsistent to easily quantify. A collection of PDF files sampled from the-eye.eu was reduced in size to 90% of the input, while a half-terabyte sample taken from the archive.org 'computermagazine' collection was reduced with greater success to 78% of the input size. A collection of epub files from Project Gutenberg was reduced to a mere 95%, as these files are light on images, and ZIP files with no files inside which can be recursively optimised are reduced only very slightly, typically to around 97%.

Supported file types

Transparent optimisation:

Non-transparent conversion (Disabled unless explicitly specified):

Description of processing

If the utility Leanify is installed, it will also be used to augment Minuimus's own processing where possible. As both programs can support a few tricks that the other cannot, they work better in conjunction than either alone on certain files. Most significently, JPEG and formats containing JPEG.

Some further capabilities are disabled by default because they are not fully transparent, but can be enabled by command-line option:

Lossy multimedia operations

Additionally, minuimus has the option (disabled by default) of converting certain legacy multimedia files into modern codecs - reducing their size greatly in the process. This is, however, an inherently lossy operation. The compression will be abandoned if it results in an output file of larger size than the input.

Minuimus.pl and associated helpers are released under the GPL licence, version three.