Sunday, November 27, 2011

Compressing media to the ultimate (audio, video and image)


Compression can be used to save the space and easily transfer the files.
7zip is the best compression utility, however it is USELESS when you are working with the media files.
There are two types of compression

1. Lossless: no lose of quality.
2. Lossy: lose of quality.

Today i am gonna tell you about best lossy compression tools available for compressing media files. In the below types of lossy compression you not gonna notice any difference until you gonna pay attention.

Video
 Now a days videos take a lot of space in our hds and with the recent increased prices of hard disks it become important to save the space.

Handbrake
Its the best video compression utility with a lot of options for compressing the videos. Tune the RF value in video tab and bit rate in audio tab to get the desired quality in your video in small sizes.I have compressed a 4.7gb homemade video DVD to a 700 mb mp4 file using this.



Audio
in my opinion there is no way to reduce the audio size without loosing a noticeable quality but using the AAC codec you can get almost same quality in half bit rates then MP3.however the only aac encoder i found working nicely is nero aac encoder but it comes with no gui.

Audiocoder
Its a very nice utility to convert and compress the audio with support for all major audio formats. i found using the HE-AAC V2 you can get almost same quality in half bitrate then your mp3 source file.


Image
HD wallpapers and pics from your HD camera can eat a lot of space too.
Riot 
Its a truly amazing utility to compress images.You hardly gonna notice the difference between compressed and uncompressed image. As you can see in the image i compressed a pic i have taken with a 12 mp camera and there is no noticeable difference between these two.

  
If you wanna experiment with a new technology of image compression google developed WebP image format with a very good compression ratio. you can download it here.
you can open webp files in chrome.To view WebP files in windows install WebP codec.
Notice that its only available in cli version yet.
i have written 2 simple script for encoding or decoding a folder of images at once,included in the zip file.


Please leave the comments/suggestions below.
Thanx for reading.

1 comments:

  1. iomoio is proving just as popular as its predecessor - the MP3 digital audio format. Pro has only been available for just under two weeks, and the software has already been downloaded above 600,000 times.

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