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Ten Dropbox Engineers Build BSD-licensed, Lossless 'Pied Piper' Compression Algorithm

An anonymous reader writes: In Dropbox's "Hack Week" this year, a team of ten engineers built the fantasy Pied Piper algorithm from HBO's Silicon Valley, achieving 13% lossless compression on Mobile-recorded H.264 videos and 22% on arbitrary JPEG files. Their algorithm can return the compressed files to their bit-exact values. According to FastCompany, "Its ability to compress file sizes could actually have tangible, real-world benefits for Dropbox, whose core business is storing files in the cloud."The code is available on GitHub under a BSD license for people interested in advancing the compression or archiving their movie files.

4 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Real Numbers? by HornWumpus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How much CPU time to compress/decompress. Standard compression is hardly the best, just a good compromise between compression and usability.

    --
    John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  2. Re:No description by harrkev · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And yet you can download the source code yourself and compile it.

    --
    "-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
  3. Re:No description by ottothecow · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Yeah, but I've got to say that it is nice to see a bunch of comments actually talking about the compression algorithm.

    The tiny bit of slashdot community that is left still talks about the actual things. If this were on Reddit, it would just be a stream of lame, overused references to the Silicon Valley show. Somebody would say "This guy fucks". Somebody else would make a joke about "Optimal tip-to-tip efficiency". Then somebody would ask "Do you know what tres commas means".

    Those things were hilarious when put forth by a group of comedic actors. They are incredibly lame when they are overused every single time something even comes tangentially close to referencing them.

    So while this particular story still sucks...it could be a lot worse.

    --
    Bottles.
  4. Re:From TFA: bit-exact or not? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Rather than abuse every commenter who has not joined your specialty on Slashdot, please take the source and write about what you find.

    Given that CPU and memory get less expensive over time, it is no surprise that algorithms work practically today that would not have when various standards groups started meeting. Ultimately, someone like you can state what the trade-offs are in clear English, and indeed whether they work at all, which is more productive than trading naah-naahs.