Video streaming is one of those things that's become part of daily life for many. But when you stop to think about it, the relatively smooth experience we have streaming a video, even while on the go, is an incredible accomplishment. Behind this modern miracle is smart compression.
In short, uncompressed video is just too big to send over the internet for streaming. Some sort of compression is necessary, or else we'd end up with endless buffering in our video and an incredible waste of bandwidth. So instead, streaming services compress the video for delivery, identifying places where information can be removed without affecting the viewing experience. The human eye will often quickly notice a change in brightness, while a subtle change in color won't register. Because of this, compression methods for streaming often separate colour and brightness (or luminosity), so that brightness can be captured more precisely.
Thanks to compression, you’re able to watch clips from the news while on your daily commute, or project the latest action-packed HD kids’ film on your wall without as much as a hiccup in delivery, even through the most frenetic, bandwidth-taxing chase scenes.
So far we've talked about traditional streaming, where a video is already fully processed and waiting to be called up. But what about live streaming? When video is coming in live, the server compressing and sending the video onward will typically break the live video into chunks a few seconds in length. It'll then compress those chunks and send them onward to a content delivery network. From there, you can enjoy the video live, or nearly live - there's usually a short delay, the result of the processing that happens behind the scenes.
Choosing the best sort of encoding (and subsequent compression) for streaming can be tricky, and doubly so for live streaming, where what's coming next is a surprise. For example, a streaming service might choose to encode a talking-head interview (lots of similar frames, little action) in one way to optimise its size for sending onward. But if the interviewer then pops a confetti cannon, the avalanche of confetti and complex motion of glittering could overwhelm that encoding method and lead to a poor quality visual. Developments are underway to solve for dynamic, and sometimes unexpected, visuals in live streaming.
So streaming services have found out that they can maximise the quality of video delivery by chunking data in a smarter way. There's another place smart chunking works, too – in compression. CompressionX, like streaming services, surveys the incoming data and breaks it up into parcels that optimise quality and speed. Just as streaming services do, compression services need to stay ahead of the curve to be ready to meet our growing expectations for lightning-fast data delivery. CompressionX does just that. Every second that’s bought back from that "time remaining" estimate makes a difference when you're archiving or retrieving your larger files.
It's time to say hello to smarter ways to break up data. We're ready for data to move faster than ever. With CompressionX, you can count on 0% quality loss and 100% reliability. Just what’s needed for focusing on rewarding work, not a compression progress indicator overlaid on your screen. Compress with confidence with Compression X. Try it for free today.
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