Question about Maximum compression/decompression

Noctosphere · May 16, 2024

Hello

I'd like to know if there is a way to compress a file as much as possible (to save space, obviously) and to decompress it back to normal for a future use

Why I ask that
I'm not a handyman, far from that. As of now, I almost always relied on my family when it comes to handywork (like installing my air conditionner, right now)
I'd like to record my uncle when he is going to install my air conditionner, so that I'll know how to do it myself next time.
There is one problem though, what I'm going to do with this video.
I was thinking of uploading it on my cloud, but I have limited storage for that.

I wanted to know if there was a way to compress the video to reduce its size as much as possible (which will lower the quality, of course), while also keeping a way to decompress it, so I can watch it next year for example.
Is there a way to do that? Or do I need to keep the original file?

Thanks in advance

4d1xlaan · May 17, 2024

you could probably record in like 480p 30fps or something to keep it as small as possible. 30fps should be perfectly watchable if you need to rewatch and follow instructions from it, for resolution you'll have to see what's good enough. maybe you can lower the bitrate too, but quality will get worse if you do that

I'd advise against applying too much video compression after the fact if you need the video to remain watchable, because once you've reduced the quality to store a smaller file size, you're not going to be able to get the original quality back which might bite you in the ass later once you need to follow video instructions again

if you can handle video editing then you could reduce file size by cutting it into smaller step-by-step clips, instead of a whole 1 hour video you might have 10 clips 1-2 minutes in length instead for example. that way your total file size is smaller, without ruining the video quality and making it unwatchable.

then on top of that I would convert each clip to a lossless compressed format (important, because again, if you convert to a lossy format, it might lose enough quality to be unwatchable), I dont know what the best format for that would be though, maybe someone else can chime in

tbh I'd do that, and keep the original file for now. then try converting to various formats, both lossless and lossy, and see which ones are the smallest file size. then rewatch the smallest file size ones, if the video quality is unwatchable then delete it and check the next smallest. and so on until you find the ones that's smallest file size and that you consider good enough to actually follow instructions from. once you're confident your edit is good enough for your needs, then you can get rid of the original

after that idk, I guess you can put them in a compressed archive as well, to squeeze a bit more space out of it. I would probably use 7zip with lzma2 compression method, 1-2 cpu threads max, and as big dictionary size as you can (from my understanding, bigger dictionary size = better compression ratio, but it takes more resources to compress and decompress the archive.) there's probably a better compression algorithm that can get better compression ratio, but it doesn't really matter right now because you can always unzip the file later and re-zip it with a better ratio if someone suggests a better way

Question about Maximum compression/decompression

Nova's Guardian

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