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Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey
Compressing your files is a good way to save space on your hard drive. At Dropbox's scale, it's not just a good idea; it is essential. Even a 1% improvement in compression efficiency can make a huge difference. That's why we conduct research into lossless compression algorithms that are highly tuned for certain classes of files and storage, like Lepton for jpeg images, and Pied-Piper-esque lossless video encoding. For other file types, Dropbox currently uses the zlib compression format, which saves almost 8% of disk storage.
We introduce DivANS, our latest open-source contribution to compression, in this blog post. DivANS is a new way of structuring compression programs to make them more open to innovation in the wider community, by separating compression into multiple stages that can each be improved independently:
Source: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2018/06/building-better-compression-together-with-divans/
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 28 2018, @12:03PM
I don't know if this is the real reason, but Dropbox received a patent [freshpatents.com] for image recompression "with an arithmetic coding that uses a sophisticated adaptive probability model."