| | Although pattern recognition is about the best that can be done when the exact information must be preserved, there are now even more effective methods of compression. These methods are referred to as "lossy" compression. "Lossless" compression must be used when "loss" is not an option. The previous example is one such case were loss is not acceptable, since the text would become meaningless. However, the "quantity over quality" method (lossy) is useful when a few incorrect and deleted bytes do not really matter. This is more common with multimedia and audio. If the byte is corrupted or lost occasionally while a video is being [[Streaming|streamed]], the consumer is very unlikely to even notice. The worst that will happen is that one pixel, for a single frame, will show the wrong color, or a single tone for a single instant will not be produced properly. When such as massive amount of information is being presented so quickly and for such a short time, the consumer is content, and [[Internet]] "bandwidth" is saved.<ref>http://computer.howstuffworks.com/file-compression3.htm</ref><ref>http://maximumcompression.com/lossless_vs_lossy.php</ref> | | Although pattern recognition is about the best that can be done when the exact information must be preserved, there are now even more effective methods of compression. These methods are referred to as "lossy" compression. "Lossless" compression must be used when "loss" is not an option. The previous example is one such case were loss is not acceptable, since the text would become meaningless. However, the "quantity over quality" method (lossy) is useful when a few incorrect and deleted bytes do not really matter. This is more common with multimedia and audio. If the byte is corrupted or lost occasionally while a video is being [[Streaming|streamed]], the consumer is very unlikely to even notice. The worst that will happen is that one pixel, for a single frame, will show the wrong color, or a single tone for a single instant will not be produced properly. When such as massive amount of information is being presented so quickly and for such a short time, the consumer is content, and [[Internet]] "bandwidth" is saved.<ref>http://computer.howstuffworks.com/file-compression3.htm</ref><ref>http://maximumcompression.com/lossless_vs_lossy.php</ref> |