Iâm tempted to just say ânoâ. However, you donât specify how the âmovieâ is stored to begin with. Is it in its original raw uncompressed state? I.e. the raw pixel data which the cameraâs photo sensitive chip picked up. Then sure, even just passing it through something like a gzip stream should make itâs size a bit smaller, possibly even to half its size. Think about it. A typical video is going to work on something like RGB values of 24bits each. That means thereâs a byte for the intensities of red, blue and green each, and each dot takes up 3 bytes. On HD, that means thereâs 1920x1080 dots for each picture the camera takes. So 2073600 pixels times 3 = 6220800 bytes. I.e. just over 6 MB per frame. Times that by how many frames in a second (typically around 30 to 60, though letâs be âgenerousâ and say 30). That means youâd need to download 186 MB per SECOND if the video is uncompressed. And an hour long video would be a grand total of over 600 TB. But thatâs a highly unlikely situation. Especially as the sorts of sizes needed for just an hour long HD quality uncompressed movie tends towards multiple terra bytes. And even with the fastest internet connections this isnât a good idea at all - would take many times longer to download than to play the movie (i.e. streaming is out of the question). No, is youâre downloading or streaming a movie, there is a 100% chance that it has already been compressed. Even just if that file is run through the absolute worst compression system possible (say something like ZIP) it would likely be compressible down to half or even a quarter of that size. But even if that was the case the file would still be several times too large to stream properly. Youâd need a minimum of a 1Gbit/sec internet connection between yourself and the server with no-one else on the internet at all. âStupidâ idea. So better compression systems are rather used. The absolute best loss-less compression systems tend to get ratios between 1/100th to 1/10th of the original movieâs size (depending on the content of the movie and how fast the action is). Note itâs possible because video has lots of redundancies and specially designed compressions can work on that fact to reduce the size quite drastically compared to general purpose compressors like ZIP/RAR/7z/etc. which would likely not give much better than a 1/10th or so. Even that is just not yet good enough, weâre still referring to TB instead of the GB you tend to see. So what is used instead? Well, playing on the fact that human sight is rather poor, some of that quality can be thrown away and no-one would notice. In jumps lossy compression. And finally weâre able to get to ratios of around 1/10000th (or better) the originalâs size. And those are the things you tend to see from streaming sites such as NetFlix. I.e. quality is lost so minimally that your eyes cannot pick it up, but the size has dropped so drastically that even a mediocre internet connection is enough to stream it in real time. Now youâre asking if it could be compressed after all that. And youâre stipulating it not to loose any quality? The answer is simply. NO!
To see the difference, take a look at this comparison between the original MPEG 2 video and the video that you see streaming. You can see ITAs a lot more clean, and with more detail. But ITAs also a lot smaller than the original. ITAs still a lot bigger than the original MPEG 2 video, but its actual size is reduced significantly. Why? Well, to understand that you need to go back to a simpler age. ITAs all about how video files are organized. Remember all those days when you would run to the local supermarket to buy a new DVD? Remember all those boxes that had their stuff on them, and you would put all those things on to go on holiday the next year. Well, most of that stuff was just a bunch of bits with no useful structure to them, and with just one file inside it!.