Origins
A reference-style history section for the ideas behind compression, codecs, containers, digital audio, and digital video.
Modern media formats did not appear from nowhere. MP3, H.264, AV1, FLAC, AAC, and streaming video all sit on top of older ideas: probability, entropy, prefix codes, prediction, transforms, psychoacoustics, and decades of work on squeezing useful information into fewer bits.
Origins of data compression
From Morse code and information theory to modern codecs.
Huffman coding
The elegant 1952 algorithm behind many lossless compression systems.
Shannon-Fano coding
The probability-based coding idea that helped prepare the ground for Huffman coding.
Entropy coding and bitrate
How Huffman-style coding connects to CBR, VBR, ABR, and modern codec rate control.
Run-length encoding
The simple idea of replacing repeated values with counts.
LZ77 and LZ78
The dictionary-based compression ideas behind ZIP, PNG, GIF, DEFLATE, and more.
Transform coding
How audio and video codecs use frequency-domain thinking to compress media.
LAME MP3 Encoder
How MP3 encoder development connects to psychoacoustics, VBR, ABR, cVBR, and entropy coding.