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Re: Determining the usefulness of compression



On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 08:44:28PM -0800, Vineet Kumar wrote:
> Huh? some AVIs and all WAVs are uncompressed, and will benefit
> enormously from compression.  The theory here is correct, though:
> don't try to compress already-compressed data; it won't work.

Well, depends on what you mean by uncompressed.  They may not have been
packed using any sort of general data compression algorithm, but they
are fairly random binary data and will not compress much at all.  Try
gzipping a .wav file; I get about a 3% benefit.  bzip2 will not be much
better.  FLAC (flac.sf.net) is a compression system designed for .wav
files; it'll give a bout a 40% saving, losslessly.

-rob

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