EDIT: Ninja'd by Asmo!
Don't know if it makes any difference but they are all .mp4's of around 300mb.. I'm most probably missing something really obvious, but just assumed I could archive them with Winrar/best compression method but that just results in a .rar of exactly the same size as does sending to a compressed zipped folder.
Am doing something wrong or do I need a specific utility for this..?
Thanks.
MP4s are already compressed, thus there is little a lossless compression algorithm like those employed by Zip can remove to reduce the size. To make them smaller you need to re-encode the MP4 files at a lower quality (i.e. more compressed as MP4 is a lossy compression algorithm that throws data away to make the file smaller).
A quick example:
If my data is as below, where each piece of data is a number (which I have separated by a space:
214 0 26 54 17 99 0 0 0 0 112 88 37 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 59 62 173 225
Then I can losslessly compress that by writing out in my compressed file:
214 0_1 26 54 17 99 0_4 112 88 37 0_7 59 62 173 225
What I've done here is replace consecutive zeros with token that represents a zero (the '0_') followed by the number of zeros that it replaces, which is 4 in the first case, and 7 in the second. This enables me to replace those symbols when I decompress it. I reduced the amount of data I wrote to the file by 9 zeros. Although there were 12 zeros I had to write out the three symbols in order to be able to recover them later.
In the case of a lossy compression (where we've decided zeros are not needed for the fidelity we require and we can throw them away permanently), I write out:
214 26 54 17 99 112 88 37 59 62 173 225
Which saves us the full 12 zeros, which is an improvement over the lossless compression of a saving of 9 zeros, but has reduced the fidelity (quality) of the data.
Hope this helps, apologies if I'm teaching you to suck eggs!
