Zip up a movie ?

[paul_pompey]

To save space on my hard drive is it possible to zip the move folder using winzip and just unzip when i want to watch the movie.

Also would it lose any quality by doing this ?

Thanks

[Gazorgan]

No quality loss in doing it.

No point in doing it either. Go ahead and try, but you won't save any space on an MPEG2 or MPEG4, already compressed as it gets (unless you have PCM sound, then you may get a gew % points)

[haloblack]

To save space on my hard drive is it possible to zip the move folder using winzip and just unzip when i want to watch the movie.

Is it possible? Yes. Will it save you any space? Probably not. In fact, there's a very good chance that the zipped file will be bigger than the original.

Here's why. (in a seriously simplified explanation.)

The zip program looks at the original, uncompressed data file, scans it for information that can be compressed, and writes a compressed .zip file back to the drive.

A movie encoder looks at the original, uncompressed video (avi) file, scans it for information that can be compressed, and writes a compressed .mpg file back to the drive.

By zipping an already compressed movie file, you're trying to remove data that probably isn't even there. And, due to the way that the program does this, you may even end up with more data than before.

Also would it lose any quality by doing this?

No. Because the zip compression method is used on critical data (binary info, program code, etc.) it must be a lossless codec. The unzipped file must be a byte-for-byte duplicate of the original. Because video data (and audio data, in the case of mp3s) depends on human perception and not machine readability to be useful, we can use lossy codecs to compress them. Data that we don't need (or that we decide we don't care about) is discarded. That makes the file different from the original, but much smaller.

Can you tell I'm bored at work today?