What are compressed and uncompressed files, how does it all work and why compressed files take less storage?
In: Technology
Compression works by finding patterns in the data and then storing those patterns instead of the data itself. There are lots of different way to do this and a lot of different theory involved but it is the basic principle. Compression does work better when the compression algorithm is built for the specific file type. So a generic compression algorithm that is made to work on any file does not work as good on say image files as a dedicated image compression algorithm. Some algorithm might even opt to lose some information that is not important and does not fit into an easy pattern. This is most common in image and video where the exact value of each pixel is not that important. Compression algorithms also do not work if there is no patterns to the data. So random data, encrypted data or already compressed data can not be compressed any further.
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