Lec #1 - An Introduction to Data Compression 2019/2020

You’ll need to take the following considerations into account:
Different data needs to be treated differently. Words in a book and floating-point numbers, for example, respond to very different algorithms.
Some data can be transformed first to make it more compressible.
Your challenge as a programmer is to figure out the best way, or combination of ways, for compressing any block of data.
The computing world that you live in, right now, is built entirely on the back of data compression algorithms.
Every web page, image, song, cat video, streaming Internet movie, selfie, video game download, microtransaction, and OS update works only because of compression algorithms. In fact, you can’t throw a single bit of data around the Internet without running into some compressed content.
Until 1996, the WAV file format was the most dominant and accepted format for creating, storing, and transferring audio data. Everyone used it, but the files were irresponsibly huge. A three-minute song could be roughly 30 MB in size and take around 9 minutes to download.
In 1996, a joint working group unveiled the MP3 file format. This new audio format changed the nature of audio on computers.
The invention of MP3 meant that anyone could get a full-length, three-minute song as about 1–3 MB of data at impressive audio quality levels.