Re:FLAC 1.3.0 Released
by Someone on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @05:02PM
(#5864708)
Not quite designed, but the effect is the same.
For most lossy encoding formats, there are many ways to compress a single file, and in general, we do not know how to pick the best size/encoding quality encoding of all possible encodings. You can get better compression/better quality at the same compression by searching harder or by searching smarter.
Typically, compression settings deal with the 'searching harder' approach.
Searching smarter is what the successive generations of encoders do, but sometimes, this also is controlled by the compression setting because an alternative approach may be better in compression quality, but so much slower that an quality-wise inferior but faster algorithm is kept as an option.
For most lossy encoding formats, there are many ways to compress a single file, and in general, we do not know how to pick the best size/encoding quality encoding of all possible encodings. You can get better compression/better quality at the same compression by searching harder or by searching smarter.
Typically, compression settings deal with the 'searching harder' approach.
Searching smarter is what the successive generations of encoders do, but sometimes, this also is controlled by the compression setting because an alternative approach may be better in compression quality, but so much slower that an quality-wise inferior but faster algorithm is kept as an option.