[flac-dev] Higher compression modes from Flake

[Martijn van Beurden]

On 14-03-13 21:24, Declan Kelly wrote:
> No. I want the tightest possible compression, while remaining 100%
> compatible with the subset that all known FLAC decoders can successfully
> stream or play now in cars, Hi-Fi units, "MP3 players" and cell phones.
> The out and out most widely supported lossless audio format could (and
> should) have a better "bang for the buck" to the average user (who has
> possibly been tempted away from MP3 or WMV or some Apple format).

If you take a look at the comparison on the FLAC website you'll see that 
the gain going from -5 (the default setting) to -8 will save you about 
0.5% of space (that's 1 in 200!) while encoding takes 4 times as long.

Trying to get more compression out of FLAC will only yield diminishing 
results. FLAC was designed to decode fast. That's one of the reasons it 
became popular, but also a constraint on how far it can be pushed.

If you really want to get the most out of FLAC, you should provide some 
patches (or hire someone to do it) that improve encoding within subset 
constraints. There's still one in-subset feature of the FLAC format that 
is not yet used, variable block length. Might get you 1% more 
compression at the cost of many, many hours of writing code and testing.