will compressing a movie file make it loose quality???

heya BTSers...

i just right clicked a movie file a found out that i can compress it to save dick space on my hard drive...

does this make the movie loose it's quality???

thanks...

Not in this manner, no. When Windows compresses files, it is comparable to putting them into zip files. They are decompressed when in use, but no information is lost.

Originally posted by iceofspades
Not in this manner, no. When Windows compresses files, it is comparable to putting them into zip files. They are decompressed when in use, but no information is lost.

thanks...

and if the quality is lesser when i compress them, i can always un-do it...

You're not going to benefit from it anyway

Pretty much all video codecs use lossy compression to get size of video even to this level because you really can't compress video with lossless compression.

Actually, anything that you compress will cause a loss of quailty, but for the most part it will be nothing that you will truly notice unless you compress it about half of the origianal file. It also depends on what format the movie is in as to how much quailty will be lost (avi, mpeg,etc). Using programs like winrar, winzip, etc. won't cause any loss of quailty, only when you are compressing files in the same format (ie. taking a avi file and compressing it even more) or compressing them to a different format.

[edit on 8-12-2004 by CyberAktiv]