What are compressed and uncompressed files, how does it all work and why compressed files take less storage?
In: Technology
Lets say I have a file that contains following:
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
I could compress that like this:
a20
Obviously it is now smaller.
Real compression comes from redundancy and from the fact that most data is wasteful in the first place. A byte is 8 bits and thats basically the smallest amount of data that can be moved or stored. How ever, if you type a message like this, this only contains 26 different letters and some numbers and punctuation. With 5 bits you can encode 31 different characters, so we could already compress the data a lot. Next level is to count the letters and notice that some are way more common than others, so lets give shorter bit lengths per character for those. You can look into Huffman coding for more detailed info.
Another form of compression is lossy compression which is used for images, videos and sound. You can easily reduce the amount of colors used in the image and it would still look the same to humans. Also you could merge similar pixels into same color and say that “this 6×6 block is white”.
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