I recently became an Arbitron ratings person (which I'm not allowed to tell anyone, hence my anonymity). I'm supposed to carry a portable device that they say picks up "sound energy" signals embedded by participating radio and TV stations so they know what I'm listening to, even if the audio is compressed. What the heck is "sound energy"? [more inside]
posted on Sep 14, 2008 - 11 answers

How can I apply Dynamic Range Compression to my iTunes library? [more inside]
posted on Sep 2, 2008 - 10 answers

OS X filter: How can I recursively unzip files (in directories that are not zipped)? [more inside]
posted on Aug 17, 2008 - 6 answers

Can I make podcasts easier to listen to in a noisy environment using compression? [more inside]
posted on Aug 14, 2008 - 9 answers

A question for chemists - I am doing a calculation about the energy requirements of taking CO2 at atmospheric pressure and temperature and compressing it to 2 MPa (2000 kPa, about 300 psi) and cooling it to -31ºC and am a bit uncertain about handling the phase change from gas to liquid. [more inside]
posted on Jul 24, 2008 - 7 answers

Is there an automated script or program to create a separate zip file for each directory? [more inside]
posted on Jul 7, 2008 - 4 answers

How do I get DVD video onto a optical driveless PC? [more inside]
posted on Jun 27, 2008 - 9 answers

Is it safe to assume that anyone professionally employed in a computer-using job (secretary, assistant, ect.) is familiar with ZIP archives? What about the public at large? [more inside]
posted on Jun 18, 2008 - 29 answers

I have just bought a Flip Ultra but the included compression software to make large video files email or YouTube ready is unbelievably slow. I'm on a PC, running XP. Can you recommend any third party compression software?
posted on Apr 26, 2008 - 7 answers

Outlook Cleaning/Archive Gurus: Help me eliminate emails with similar (but not duplicate) content! [more inside]
posted on Apr 24, 2008 - 2 answers

How do I open a ".tar.tgz" file? That's all one long extension. [more inside]
posted on Mar 29, 2008 - 21 answers

Can anyone recommend a small/lightweight image compression program that can run on Windows Server 2003? Thanks [more inside]
posted on Mar 4, 2008 - 11 answers

compressed files inside of compressed files inside of compressed files. arg. please help me automate this process. [more inside]
posted on Feb 9, 2008 - 7 answers

Stupid-question-filter: Suppose you have a 10 MP camera and take your pictures at 3 MP. Would the quality be any different than if you were using a 3 MP camera at its top setting? (assuming the two cameras are otherwise identical) [more inside]
posted on Feb 7, 2008 - 10 answers

Software to ABX audio files (on a Mac)? [more inside]
posted on Jan 22, 2008 - 2 answers

Preparing videos for youtube: what are the most efficient video/audio compressions to use when trying to keep a video under 100 MBs with sacrificing as little quality as possible? [more inside]
posted on Dec 17, 2007 - 4 answers

Hi there, I am doing an honours project on the effects of boat noise on dolphin communication and my supervisor had this idea of using compression to analyse this. He basically suggested that we record dolphin vocalizations in the presence and absence of boat noise, and then compress the files and determine which compresses more (dolphin sounds with the boat noise, or dolphin sounds without the boat noise). His thinking was that less complex sounds should compress less...so he thinks that boat noise will compress less than dolphin vocalizations. Thus, if dolphin vocalizations happen to compress more in the presence of boat noise than they do without the boat noise...this would sort of imply they are "losing information" so to speak. Does this make sense? [more inside]
posted on Jun 25, 2007 - 15 answers

I need help with video compression... [more inside]
posted on Jun 4, 2007 - 13 answers

A follow-up to this question: I need to get uncompressed digital video recorded to a hard drive for the purpose of developing compression algorithms. I need a portable solution. High-def is not required. [more inside]
posted on Apr 26, 2007 - 19 answers

Can anyone offer advice for going back to the gym after a back injury and six months of downtime? [more inside]
posted on Mar 11, 2007 - 15 answers

What is (/the original purpose of) a compression shirt? A local store has long-sleeved compression shirts on sale cheap and I've been looking for a cozy-n-toasty shirt for wearing like an undershirt in the winter that isn't longjohn/thermo material.
posted on Feb 19, 2007 - 9 answers

What UNIX command-line tool can I used to convert tiff files to lzw-compressed tiff files. [more inside]
posted on Jan 16, 2007 - 5 answers

Could turning on hard drive compression actually speed up access on my laptop? [more inside]
posted on Nov 25, 2006 - 10 answers

What's the best video compression format for reviewing single frames? [more inside]
posted on Oct 15, 2006 - 10 answers

What are the best digital (still) cameras for video? [more inside]
posted on Jul 27, 2006 - 15 answers

Can you help me be a better home recording engineer? I've posted some things to MuFi which were pretty fun, but are technically suck-tronic. [more inside]
posted on Jul 17, 2006 - 19 answers

What's the best way to compress a large mp3 file (70MB) to something that I can send via e-mail on AOL (limit 11 MB)? WinZip only compresses it to 68 MB? Any free programs do the trick?
posted on May 7, 2006 - 18 answers

I remember a typical late 1990s Bubble story where a scammer was hyping a fake streaming video technology to grab investor cash. What name should I look up under? [more inside]
posted on Feb 12, 2006 - 16 answers

Is it possible to compress a large file while it is writing to disk? My IT shop is developing a program to translate a huge binary file of data to a field delimited text file suitable to be pulled into standard data analysis tools. I know applications can read and manipulate data from a compressed file without explicitly decompressing it. But can translation and compression occur simultaneously or must the whole file be written out and then compressed? This makes a big difference on the data storage requirements. Thanks
posted on Feb 2, 2006 - 9 answers

Video codecs/tips/tools for easier Internet downloading [more inside]
posted on Jan 11, 2006 - 12 answers

DV video compression question - Do I have to recapture all these tapes?! [more inside]
posted on Dec 21, 2005 - 9 answers

I'm looking for a Zip file extractor for Windows with some specific requirements that I haven't been able to meet... [more inside]
posted on Oct 8, 2005 - 8 answers

I want to make a compilation of clips from a series of (i think Divx-encoded) AVI files -- basically, a 15 to 20 minute "best of" montage taken from about 10 hours of video. The native resolution of the files is something around 500px by 250 or so -- 16:9 ratio -- 1 hour = ~300MBs. [more inside]
posted on Oct 7, 2005 - 12 answers

Are there any Windows RAM compression programs still out there? [more inside]
posted on Aug 16, 2005 - 13 answers

What's a good book (or online resource) about audio editing for a beginner who is smart and wants in-depth knowledge? I'm working with dialogue mostly -- not music. [more inside]
posted on Aug 8, 2005 - 5 answers

Okay, videophiles...two questions. 1) Where can I host 50-75Mb of QuickTime files online (preferably for free), and b) What are the most efficient web compression settings? [more inside]
posted on May 30, 2005 - 5 answers

This is one of those questions that will make me look very silly when it's answered, so I'll abandon any pretense of dignity straight off: with the ideas set forth in this comic about talking clip-art dinosaurs, why can't any arbitrarily huge amount of data be transmitted as a simple statement of a date and time?
posted on May 10, 2005 - 31 answers

I've undertaken some data compression research and have been looking for publicly available data sets of large integers without much success. My research is in the same general area as this paper, and I have contacted the authors but unfortunately their data is lost in the mists of time. Can anyone recommend any publicly available data sets of large integers?
posted on Apr 29, 2005 - 13 answers

Is it possible to convert a standard JPEG into a progressive one without losing quality? If so, what can I use to do it?
posted on Apr 22, 2005 - 7 answers

So, I've bitten off more than I can chew. I've been handed a 60mb VOB file of a television commercial that I want to post to the website of said company. [more inside]
posted on Mar 7, 2005 - 8 answers

The Library of Congress uses the MrSID image compression format for many maps and other items available online. How can I get the full-resolution files, in whole, onto my mac so that I can edit/print them from photoshop? [more inside]
posted on Feb 27, 2005 - 7 answers

Is there a free VST- or AudioUnit-compatibile plugin designed to remove or reduce compression artifacts from low-quality audio being re-recorded at a higher bitrate? Or special settings for a specific filter that will do this? I need one for AudioHijack on OS X.
posted on Jan 20, 2005 - 6 answers

When I went with iMovie's "web compression" option -- 240x180, 12 frames a second, unspecified level of compression and "medium-quality" stereo sound -- for a recent 5.5 minute DV clip I shot, I got a 6MB .mov that I felt had serious compression issues. My first swipe at using the "expert" compression settings, conversely, gave me a 230MB file for the same resolution; a second pass was "only" 54MB but the nature of the "better" compression scheme made it look worse. And in my experience, making it an .mpg only makes it bigger. And yet I've seen TV episodes that look reasonably good full-screen and are only 350MB .avi files. I feel like I should be able to get 1 MB/minute of 240x180 video at great quality -- I've downloaded streaming video that would back up that assumption. Can someone point me toward wisdom?
posted on Oct 15, 2004 - 9 answers

[Digiphotography] Is there a difference between a digital photo taken in an lossless file format such as uncompressed TIFF vs. RAW Format?
posted on Aug 7, 2004 - 6 answers

Yeargh, I stupidly hit "compress old files to save disk space" when the iTunes folder on my WinXP box got towards full. As a result, about half of my music is inacessible through iTunes. At this point, I'm clicking into each artist/album folder and uncompressing them one at a time, then re-adding to the library. I've been at this for three hours and now am up to "C." How do I uncompress these files in one fell swoop? I've been all over the "help" documentation for both WinXP and iTunes as well as Google.
posted on Jun 29, 2004 - 12 answers

Let's say I have an Apple OS X computer with a gigantic, 1.5 GB file that I'd like to put onto 3 or 4 CDs, to give someone. What's the best way to spread a file across several discs? Multiple zip files? The UNIX zip command? Some backup program?
posted on Mar 23, 2004 - 9 answers