Robot Monkeys

Dear Interweb,

AVI files, MP3 files, in fact, pretty much every media file you care about, have this thing called a “codec.” This thing tells how the audio/video is encoded. These things are made by some pretty smart people. People that know math. Now if all a codec did was encode the audio/video, they wouldn’t be very interesting. Essentially, there’d be just one. The reason why there are so many codecs, is that these things compress the data.

So if the data is compressed, then why are you trying to compress it more? Do you think it will compress it more? No. Quite the opposite. Compressing and already compressed file, makes it bigger.

Seriously. It makes it bigger.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself!

Let’s look at this file:

Wow. Raring that that AVI certainly made it so much smaller. Imagine if we would rar that rar! Wow!