About 33gb.

Sigh.

Alright then, what is on the Blu-Ray:

You take: one PS3 with linux on it and one copy of MSG4. You look at the Blu-ray contents. And you'll find:

Two folders: MSG and O (being single player and online)
MSG is 27.2GB in size. O clocks in at 2.7GB

In the folder MSG you'll see four subdirectories (some 2GB of random files) and then there's the actual files, being (excluding the two executables and the demo file):

BGM.dat - 1.7 GB (this is the BackGroundMusic file)
Codec.dat - 7.0 MB (Codec datafiles)
Movie.dat - 3.0GB (cutscenes)
sdpack.dat - 346.4MB (unknown, likely sound related given the name)
speech.dat - 257.3MB (speech audio)
vox.dat - 1.7 GB (other audio)
and stage00.dat - stage05.dat (between 419MB and 1.1GB)

Given the above (and the dolby digital logos in the game), audio is obviously already compressed as the speech alone is clearly more than the measly 20 odd minutes that would fit in that space.

The same goes for the BGM, 1.7GB is not nearly enough for uncompressed seven channel surround music that goes on for the lengths we see.

The 1.7GB of vox data probably contains the rest of the samples and might be uncompressed, but then that doesn't fit with the game featuring a dolby surround (i.e. compressed audio) intro.

The stages themselves (each act is a file and contains textures etc) are no bigger than we'd expect this generation either - take a look at the Gears of War stages clocking in at 500MB+ each for comparison.

In other words, that 20GB of uncompressed audio is utter nonsense. As is the 9.0GB of 1080P cutscenes (hint - all but one or two of the cutscenes are verifiably in-game and hence in the stages files which are all below 1.2GB in size). Also, we can see that any notion of the data being repeated dozens of times on the disc is likewise false.

It would be childs play to make a directory layout for this that confirms to the Xbox 360 DVD standard of 7-8GB a disc that contains all the data in it's current form. It would take a few discs though.

Compressing the audio/cutscene video further is also an option, but the AV component is only about 6GB total so it's not going to massively change the data size. Now, if textures are further compressed for the 360 version we could see a bigger gain, space wise. However, that would likely impact the visuals.

Looking this up took me no more than 15 minutes. And yes, obviously a 360 version is possible. But please, no more 20GB of audio nonsense!

(should people want screenshots of this or directory dumps, that can be arranged)

@Geldorn: That doesn't nearly add up to 27 GB, or am I missing something?

@Geldorn: Thanks for that. I don't have MGS4, or I might've done the same thing with my Gentoo installation on my PS3.

One thing though, does your fiile manager report 'MSG' as being 27.2GB in size? I may have added it up wrong, but the 2gigs of random files plus the *.dat files only appear to be about 10 gigs.

If there is a discrepancy, could the rest of the files be stored in some funky non-standard file system on the disk?

Seperate partitions, perhaps?

On a blu ray disk???

On a

Heh, you're absolutely right. Goes to show what happens when you just type over the file sizes you see without adding them up.

I might have missed something there then, I'll check it out when I have the time.

I didn't note the sizes of demo.dat and the two MSG.self binaries, but that shouldn't be the ten odd GB I'm missing now.