1

I have several terabytes of 1080p quality video on my NTFS drive in various formats, mostly MP4 and AVI. Will visual/audio quality of these videos be changed in any way by ticking the box to enable compression on my drive? I feel I heard a wives tale about this somewhere.

Info5ek
  • 113
  • 5
  • It depends on how fast your hard drives are.... – DavidPostill Dec 16 '15 at 21:27
  • How can drive speed affect video audio quality if the drive is able to playback the video without stuttering? Not sure I follow. – Info5ek Dec 16 '15 at 21:28
  • 1
    As long as the drive decompresses fast enough it will not affect the video quality. Aslo many playback program will buffer the input. – DavidPostill Dec 16 '15 at 21:42
  • Without actually testing it… I'd have thought the system would be smart enough to not even attempt to compress incompressible formats like movies & audio. – Tetsujin Dec 17 '15 at 09:16
  • Possible duplicate of [How does NTFS compression affect performance?](http://superuser.com/questions/411720/how-does-ntfs-compression-affect-performance) – Xen2050 Dec 17 '15 at 13:51
  • Performance is generally understood to be different from visual/audio quality – Info5ek Dec 18 '15 at 00:57

1 Answers1

4

No, MS uses a lossless, content agnostic compression algorithm, so a decompressed stream of bits is exactly the same as if it had never been compressed in the first place. Some video and audio compression algorithms can be lossy (information has been iretreivably lost in the process), but the MS disk compression cares not about the content, only about the bits.

Consider though, that if your system is experiencing issues with IO capacity, the additional work of decompressing the stream may introduce lag. This is entirely dependenant on your hardware, and your load at any given time.

Also note that compressing video files will result in almost no change in their size. Video files have already been compressed using a codec like xvid/x.264/VP-9/etc.

Frank Thomas
  • 35,097
  • 3
  • 77
  • 98