Would like some tips on compressong files as much as possible without quality loss

cracker2

cracker2

Member
A few are programs,majorty are video games,movies,& music.Some are already compressed but a majority of them aren't.The external drive it's all on comes up to 431.7GB with 33.3GB left in the drive,so I got alot of compressing to do.What program do you use?How do I know the compression limit so I won't lose quality?I have 189GB in movies alone,how small could I probably get it down to?I never messed with compressing files because risk of quality loss & honestly i'm pretty ignorant about it.Knowing my luck i'd probably turn a 1080p quality movie into a 240p from not knowing what i'm doing:o .

I went on youtube but none seem to go into any detail really,they just point & click & don't discuss methods & quality.Probably haven't found a good vid I guess.
 
Regular data you can zip them, but music and movies you need to rip them at a lower bit rate. If your music is in the mp3 format, then they are already compressed about as small as they can get. If it is wav files then rip them to mp3, and they will be about 10 to 15 percent smaller, but will lose sound quality over the original wav file.

Pretty much same with movies. avi, wmv, mp4 files are already compressed and you won't make them to much smaller, but if you have full 1920x1080 Res HD movies, then ripping them to 720x480 avi at say 1500kbs will still give good results,but won't be HD. If the movie is a Romance Comedy a avi is fine, If it is a fast paced Action Adventure movie then I would leave them alone.

A alternative on HD, is rip them at a lower bit rate as a mkv file. The software I use takes over 24 hours though to re-rip one 2 hour HD TS file to a mkv file, so it is computer time consuming, my dual core cpu runs about 99 percent during the conversion. So if I take a 9 gig 1920x1080 10MBS TS file, and convert it to a 1920x1080 5MBS mkv file, the file will be under 5 gigs, and still have HD quality.

You really didn't post enough info on the file types to go into much more detail.
 
Thanks for the reply.I think I may have used the wrong words.I was thinking about getting 7-zip & "pack" my files.Like say I have a mkv thats 10gb,I just want to pack it,not change file type.What is confusing me is all the different compression I mean packing levels etc & doing it without messing up the file & losing quality.
 
Like User0one said...files such as audio and movie files cannot be compressed to make them a lot smaller than they already are such as MP3 audio file which is already a compressed audio file type...and so on...

Text can be compressed a lot more and better than let's say AVI video file type...and so on...
 
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