Scratch

Firedrake969 · 2012-06-15 18:15:21

What exactly does compressing do besides use less space?

jvvg · 2012-06-15 18:54:21

That's all it does.

Firedrake969 · 2012-06-15 18:59:24

How, though? It's the same amount of binary space...

jvvg · 2012-06-15 19:14:31

I think that if a background is all white, it remembers that, and it blends image pixels and audio frames, etc.

trinary · 2012-06-15 19:40:16

Data compression.

lhlien · 2012-07-09 00:29:35

Pretend you were to write a sentence. Ex: The big, furry, cat walked. Compression is like that, just with binary. The previous sentence would be like: The cat walked. The details were taken out, but the main sentence structure is the same.

zbugni · 2012-07-09 19:38:00

Sorta reduces quality and blends things together, I'd reccomend it for a big project but not for a smaller one.

SJRCS_011 · 2012-07-09 21:22:17

lhlien wrote:
Pretend you were to write a sentence. Ex: The big, furry, cat walked. Compression is like that, just with binary. The previous sentence would be like: The cat walked. The details were taken out, but the main sentence structure is the same.

Somewhat tongue
That's what lossy compression does. It eliminates detail, resulting in a smaller filesize, but lower quality.
Lossless compression (which doesn't lose quality [theoretically]) takes similar bytes and merges them. This, however, doesn't compress a file as much.