Not all compression techniques reduce qu ...

After reading various threads on optical disks, I can safely say that a majority of System Wars forumites do not know anything when it comes to compression. I will boil it down into three main points.

1. Not all compression techniques reduce quality.
2. Lossless compression is a technique that reduces the size of a file without any reduction in quality.
3. Lossy compression reduces the quality of certain types of files, in order to reduce their file size.

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In other words, with lossless compression techniques, it is possible to reconstruct the entire file, without any quality loss. On a game console that reads data from an optical disk, (which is generally a slow process,) there is absolutely no reason to not apply lossless compression. No compression whatsoever will simply waste disk space, increase loading times, and not have any quality benefits.Lossy compression is better suited for audio or video, which requires enormous amounts of data, and is usually hard to compress with lossless techniques. Some quality is lost, but if the right techniques are used, human beings will be unable to tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed video and audio. Of course, there are always lackluster compression techniques. The best game example I can think of is Grand Theft Auto. The PS2 didn't have the processing capability to handle better compressions, so the game sounded bad, especially with dialoge.Incase you would like to read more on these compression techniques, wikipedia is a great source.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losslesshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LossyNot all compression techniques reduce qu ...
The problem is, lossless compression can't compress things small enough. That's why it works well with documents and what not where you can't afford to lose any imformation. When it comes to video and sound, there's just no point. You wouldn't be able to take 18GB's and use lossless compression to make it fit on a DVD9. Especially when everything is HD and 7.1. I thought you said you were a computer scientist in another thread?Not all compression techniques reduce qu ...
[QUOTE=''giantsfan91'']The problem is, lossless compression can't compress things small enough. That's why it works well with documents and what not where you can't afford to lose any imformation. When it comes to video and sound, there's just no point. You wouldn't be able to take 18GB's and use lossless compression to make it fit on a DVD9. Especially when everything is HD and 7.1. I thought you said you were a computer scientist in another thread?[/QUOTE]Actually, lossless and lossy compressions are both used in most projects. You probably use both quite often. A list of lossless compression techniques. Apple Lossless - ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) Direct Stream Transfer - DST Free Lossless Audio Codec - FLAC Meridian Lossless Packing - MLP Monkey's Audio - Monkey's Audio APE RealPlayer - RealAudio Lossless Shorten - SHN TTA - True Audio Lossless WavPack - WavPack lossless WMA Lossless - Windows Media Lossless Graphic compression ABO - Adaptive Binary Optimization GIF - (lossless, but contains a very limited number color range) PNG - Portable Network Graphics JPEG-LS - (lossless/near-lossless compression standard) JPEG 2000 - (includes lossless compression method, as proven by Sunil Kumar, Prof San Diego State University) JBIG2 - (lossless or lossy compression of B%26W images) TIFF WMPhoto - (includes lossless compression method) Qbit Lossless Codec - Focuses on intra-frame (single-image) lossless compression Video compression Huffyuv SheerVideo CorePNG [2] MSU Lossless Video Codec LCL [3] Qbit Lossless Codec [4] Animation codec Lagarith H.264/MPEG-4 AVC lossy compression techniques Image compression Fractal compression JPEG JPEG 2000, JPEG's successor format that uses wavelets. Wavelet compression JBIG2 Cartesian Perceptual Compression: Also known as CPC DjVu ICER, used by the Mars Rovers: related to JPEG 2000 in its use of wavelets HAM, hardware compression of color information used in Amiga computers Video compression Flash (also supports JPEG sprites) H.261 H.263 H.264/MPEG-4 AVC MNG (supports JPEG sprites) Motion JPEG MPEG-1 Part 2 MPEG-2 Part 2 MPEG-4 Part 2 Ogg Theora (noted for its lack of patent restrictions) Sorenson video codec VC-1 Music compression AAC - used by, for example, Apple Computer ADPCM ATRAC Dolby AC-3 MP2 MP3 Musepack Ogg Vorbis (noted for its lack of patent restrictions) WMA - Microsoft invention Speech compression CELP G.711 G.726 HILN AMR (used by GSM cell carriers, such as T-Mobile) Speex (noted for its lack of patent restrictions)

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Most of these you probably haven't heard of, but some of them you may use on a daily basis.Secondly, where are you getting these numbers from? You're making up numbers to support your argument. I know you are trying to use them as an example, but you are overstating the amount of data required for today's average games.Third, 7.1 sound doesn't take up any extra space in games, if they are projected three dimensionally in real-time. Let me explain. If you are playing Halo 2, the same sound for a gunshot is played on a stereo sound system as on a 5.1 sound system. The only difference is the speakers the sound is projected to.
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Yup, compression is by no means automatically bad for quality.
vinyl FTW