MP3, the digital audio coding format, changed the way we listen to music and drove the adoption of countless new devices over the last couple of decades. And now, it’s dead. The developer of the format announced this week that it has officially terminated its licensing program.
In this video, snakes are forced to slither between two boards. The boards are placed successively closer together until the poor snake is wriggling. But this isn’t about annoying a snake—it’s about physics.
If you use Facebook, you’ve probably uploaded a picture at some point. While Facebook is great for sharing, it also uses some pretty ruthless compression (compared to other sites, anyway) that makes your pictures look like crap. Here’s how to prevent that from happening.
MP3s have become so ubiquitous that we often forget it's a compression format. When music gets trimmed to one-tenth of its original size, lots of information deemed "unimportant" gets tossed out. Here's what we're missing.
Back in 1894, Olaus Henrici invented a machine called the Harmonic Analyzer. Way ahead of its time, it could pick out all the individual frequencies that make up complex sound waves—a technique we now rely on for everything from compressed audio to digital images.
If you've ever tried to squeeze data down into a tiny file, you'll know that there comes a point where you can't get it any smaller. This video explains why that is.
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo. Even if you failed English class, you'd recognize that phrase anywhere. It's from Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. But would you recognize this phrase: O Romep+ Rpldo wiepffnre arr!riov Romep@. That's Shakespeare too. If Shakespeare was compressed over and over again by JPEG.
Streaming video is the future. Well, it's the present, but the future too. And as resolutions increase, it's going to be a tougher and tougher proposition to pipe all that data to your screen of choice in a timely fashion. Fortunately, the new H.265 standard has been approved by the ITU and it's here to help.
No one's going to drop $25,000 on a fabulous 84-inch 4K TV without something to watch on it. So to get the broadcast ball rolling, Sony has demonstrated a real-time satellite transmission system that cleverly compresses a 4K signal without reducing its stunning image quality.
Jonathan Harchick has created what is likely the world's longest YouTube video. It's 571 minutes long and takes over 23 days to watch.
A compressed, blurry image full of compression artifacts is pretty gross—one of the scourges of the internet. But offline, it's a work of art. Andy Denzler creates captivating painted images that mimic the flaws of digital ones.
One year ago, someone decided to test the image and sound degradation that occurs when you upload a video to YouTube, then download the YouTube result, and upload it again. He did it 1,000 times, with trippy results.
Jörg M. Colberg, an accomplished astrophysicist and photographer, created a series of images entitled "American Pixels" in which he applied a self-made compression algorithm to photographs, turning them into artworks of the digital age.
Comcast has begun compressing HDTV shows in order to deliver more HD channels to you while using the same amount of bandwidth. They didn't use to do this before, but now, when compared to Verizon FiOS, the channels are grainy and blocky and full of artifacts—a result of shoving three channels into a space where only…
ADS announced InstantVideo To-Go, a nifty little $79.95 widget that supercharges compression of video into that oh-so-sweet H.264 format. The company calls it the first hardware-based H.264 conversion device for PCs. This little USB key is a video transfer accelerator that lets you convert any video into that…
Although some of us here at Gizmodo are near-deaf from spending way too much time in musical environments exceeding 130dB, we're still happy to hear the rumor that Apple will soon distribute tracks compressed in its Apple Lossless compression format on the iTunes Music Store.
