As technology improves day in day out, users of multimedia systems expect more detailed and higher quality video images and audio sounds. As part of this report, I will be critically evaluating the compression techniques lossy and lossless, which are widely used to compress video and audio.
             Applications for high detailed graphics and sound require more and more storage space. A prime example is an internet. The Internet is very diverse; many sites having audio, photo, and video galleries. All of which take up a lot of space to store, especially if they have not been compressed. Multimedia systems would also have insufficient bandwidth for the transmission of data. Millions of people use the internet for viewing, downloading and transferring data. The Internet typically provides about 24 to 56KB/second. As images are becoming higher quality it means that downloading an image from the Internet from an uncompressed format e.g. 3MB could take about 7 minutes utilizing a high-speed connection of 64KB/second. If the image were compressed at a 10:1 compression ratio, the storage requirement is reduced to 300KB and transmission time for downloading it would drop to under 6 seconds [1]. This is just an example of why the compression of data is important.
             This is the reduction in the size of data. This is done in order to save storage space or the transmission time for downloading or transferring the data. Compression can be performed on the data content or on the entire transmission unit, but this depends on several factors. Content compression can be as simple as removing all extra space characters and substituting a single repeat character to indicate repeated characters and inserting smaller strings for frequently occurring characters. This kind of compression can reduce a file such as text by up to 50% of its original size. A program, using either a formula or algorithm, would carry out compression. This would be
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