Why Is File Or Data Compression Necessary For Multimedia Activities?

Multimedia is where you use some or all of the following types of media - sound, video, animation, images, text.

Now text files are rather simple things and take up little space on a hard disk.  They are easy to transfer quickly from a device to a computer.

Sound files of high quality take up a lot of room.  A standard CD holds 70 minutes worth of sound and uses 640Mb to do so.  That's one Mb per minute roughly.

Images also take up a lot of space.  A single screen as a bitmap (uncompressed) image can represent over a Mb of data.  Video uses over 24 frames per second, so that is a huge amount of data to transfer.

To simplify the data transfer process and give you some chance of actually being able to use a multimedia presentation, data compression is needed.

MP3 for example can compress a sound file by a factor of ten.  Special video compression techniques can do the same.  Otherwise, in a multimedia activity, you simply could not transfer enough data to make it useful to anyone, unless the resolution/quality was deliberately kept very low. And then no-one would want to use it anyway...

Compression does reduce the overall quality, but unless you are very fussy, most people accept that.

Multimedia files are usually very large in size. Therefore for the purpose of the storage and transfer of large-sized multimedia files, the file sizes need to be reduced. Files which contain text and other files may also sometimes need to be encoded or compressed for the purpose of sending e-mail and also for other multimedia applications.

In the field of computer science, the term data compression is also known as source coding. The term data compression or source coding is defined as the process by which information is encoded using fewer bits (or other units which bear information) that a more obvious representation would use. This is due to the fact that the process of compression of data uses specific schemes for the encoding of the information.

The phrase data compression is also defined as the process by which data is converted from one format to another format which is physically smaller in size. The same logical information is stored using less physical information.