On: Lossless audio compression with libpng

[AceJohnny2]

People forget one advantage of FLAC over other compression methods: it's directly playable. You don't need to decompress the whole thing before you can start playing it.

That's an essential feature for a media compression format.

[robryk → AceJohnny2]

Most compression formats have blocks and their lengths commonly fall into a few tens of kilobytes range; they can always be made smaller (which usually causes some loss of compression ratio). Decompression can then proceed one block at a time, so you can decompress in a streaming fashion.

At the same time, most compression formats are very unsuited to starting decompression from any other point than the beginning of the stream. I don't know how easy it is to seek in FLAC files, but to my best knowledge it's at least possible.

[fulafel → AceJohnny2]

This technique does not preclude streaming, indeed libpng supports it.

[raverbashing → AceJohnny2]

It might be possible to create an libpng player, however, there may be a limitation in the way it is uncompressed to allow that

Of course there are FLAC players, but without one of those you would need to uncompress it to wav before playing.

[benatkin → raverbashing]

That was implied by what AceJohnny2 said.