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.
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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
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