Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "gzip file compression in 100 Seconds" video.

  1. The key point not mentioned here is that information content is a statistical concept. The closer your data stream looks like to random noise, the less compressible it is. It is inherent in the design of compression algorithms that they produce a data stream that looks very much like random noise.
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  2. The main use for archives that I see is not for saving my own data, but for distributing collections of files. And normally when you get one of those you want to extract everything.
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  3. zstd is widespread enough that you can consider it portable nowadays. And tar supports it, too.
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  4. If your images use a compression like JPEG, then they already look very much like random noise. In which case further compression isn’t going to work very well.
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  5. So which “one thing” does tar do? It was originally about saving files to tape, but that function is essentially obsolescent now.
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  6. Yes, it is definitely becoming more popular. Blender has removed the option for gzip compression when saving its documents (though it can still read existing gzip-compressed ones) in favour of zstd.
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  7. That’s nothing ... try a “zip bomb”.
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  8. Actually tar will automatically recognize the compression format when extracting, so “xvf” should work on all compressed tar archives.
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  9. Most download tools and protocols very quickly acquired the ability to resume interrupted transfers, precisely to get around this problem.
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  10.  @xrafter  The OP did say “archiving a folder”, not “archiving a single file”.
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  11. tar supports a number of different compression methods these days, not just gzip. Which is the best? I was going to say bzip2, but I think zstd is taking over nowadays.
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  12.  @astral6749  Does it? Ah, it’s the way you pronounce “z”.
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  13. “f” means create an output file, rather than writing to a tape drive.
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  14. Too bad.
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