what file or installer does steam and playstation store download？

[derekchan]

does steam download a game installer.exe when i buy it?

does playstation download .pkg ?

[Eigenvektor]

Steam doesn't download and run a game installer as such. In a sense, the Steam client is the installer. When you click on Install, it downloads and extracts the game's files into a (Steam specific) directory, and potentially performs some post-installation steps like adding registry keys.

 

An installer doesn't do anything else, except you generally need to download the whole installer first, before it can then extract files where they need to go, while the Steam client can combine download, and extraction of files where they need to go into a single step. And it can do that for any Steam game, not just a single one, like a game specific installer would.

 

~edit: of course the Steam client does additional things, like provide a store interface, cloud saves, DRM, etc. but at its heart, Steam is a platform that distributes files to your computer on demand and does whatever is needed to turn these files into an executable game/application/whatever. I would assume PlayStation works pretty much the same way.

[manikyath]

steam essentially downloads the game in a deployed form, if it's packaged at all it's for transfer efficiency reasons. steam can also download individual files of a game's install, that's what it does when you 'repair' a game from steam, and it finds missing files.

 

as for what playstation does... if they have any kind of brain, they do the exact same thing, because if you control the database and you control the installer, there isnt much need to package the game in a pre-defined standardized way.

[Eigenvektor]

9 minutes ago, manikyath said:

if it's packaged at all it's for transfer efficiency reasons.

To add to this, they not only compress files for faster transfer, they can also do delta updates. So instead of sending you a changed file as a whole, they only send the parts of it that changed (along with some meta-data like where these chunks need to go and file hashes).

 

You can sometimes see this when you're updating a large game. The download itself may only be a few megabytes, but afterwards it goes over gigabytes of game files to patch them, which can actually take longer than the download. This helps Valve to reduce how much data they need to store and transfer, which is obviously beneficial for their profits.

[derekchan]

4 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Steam doesn't download and run a game installer as such. In a sense, the Steam client is the installer. When you click on Install, it downloads and extracts the game's files into a (Steam specific) directory, and potentially performs some post-installation steps like adding registry keys.

 

An installer doesn't do anything else, except you generally need to download the whole installer first, before it can then extract files where they need to go, while the Steam client can combine download, and extraction of files where they need to go into a single step. And it can do that for any Steam game, not just a single one, like a game specific installer would.

 

~edit: of course the Steam client does additional things, like provide a store interface, cloud saves, DRM, etc. but at its heart, Steam is a platform that distributes files to your computer on demand and does whatever is needed to turn these files into an executable game/application/whatever. I would assume PlayStation works pretty much the same way.

Does android play store provide .APK to install?there is some .APK file to download on third party web host. 

The last question is about PC speaker genelec the ones series DSP monitor speaker. It is comman to decode video game with dobly digital on av receiver.

 

The setup of genelec speaker is connect a USB cable to genelec kit which is hook up the front speaker via lan cable.

I know the structure of Intel CPU is included dsp unit.  So does the dsp of Intel CPU handle dobly digital and transcode it to lpcm?

Thankyou

[Eigenvektor]

2 hours ago, derekchan said:

Does android play store provide .APK to install?there is some .APK file to download on third party web host.

No, the Play Store does not offer direct APK downloads. While an Android mobile/tablet technically downloads an APK through the Play Store App, it doesn't offer a way to access the file directly. Third party sites typically scrape the Play Store site to get access to a direct link, which is somewhat of a legal gray area.

 

Quote

I know the structure of Intel CPU is included dsp unit.  So does the dsp of Intel CPU handle dobly digital and transcode it to lpcm?

I have no idea. I would recommend to ask a new question in the appropriate subforum (e.g. https://linustechtips.com/forum/40-audio/), so that people with audio knowledge get to see it.