Title basically says it all. I understand how photos and videos can trade quality for file size, but files like games or large folders can be shrunk into a .rar or .zip file, transferred, and pulled back out with no loss to functionality. How does that work? If nothing’s being taken away how is space being saved?
In: Technology
Compression algorithm will try to find patterns in the data in various ways and then instead of outputting the data they output the pattern to recreate the data. This is how both lossy and lossless compression work. However for lossy compression used for audio, images and video the compression algorithm will find the patterns it thinks is important and then ignore any deviation from that pattern while a lossless compression algorithm will note down any deviation between the data and the patterns it found as it is not known which deviation is important and which is not. Different algorithms is able to find patterns in different types of data so if you use the wrong algorithm or the data have few recognizable patterns at all then it will not compress very good. This is why you can not compress already compressed data as there are no more patterns to find.
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