Production Glossary
Lossy Compression
Lossy compression is a data encoding technique that is typically used in the compression of video. The purpose of lossy compression is to decrease the amount of data that a computer stores, works with, or transmits. When using lossy compression, portions of information from a video file is deleted, thus shrinking the amount of bandwidth it originally required. The higher the lossy compression, the lower the quality of the video when it is uncompressed.Two techniques are employed to bring about lossy compression: lossy predictive codecs and lossy transform codecs. Lossy predictive codecs use former data that has been decoded to forecast the image. Lossy transform codecs take samples of a picture, divide it into small units, quantize them, and, finally, entropy code the results.
