Which Method Has Done More To Reduce Bandwidth/Data Than Any Other?

You can try Huffman here. Your can try LZW here.

The method is Huffman Coding. It has been working away in the background for decades, and has done more to reduce the amount of bandwidth that we use, and in the amount of disk space, than virtually any other method.

Huffman coding often reduces data to less than 10% of its original size. So, the more bits we send and store, the more energy that is used … so Huffman is the greenest protocol around … saving the planet! We see it in PKZIP, AVI, MOV, MP3, RAR, DOCX, MP4, and so on much more.

It also shares the crown with Lempel-Ziv, which is used to store repeated patterns. With GIF, Lempel-Ziv takes the same pixel blocks and create a pointer to them. In the definition we thus just need to store the reference.

Huffman Principles

Huffman coding uses a variable length code for each of the elements within the data. This normally involves analyzing the data to determine the probability of its elements. The most probable elements are coded with a few bits and the least probable coded with a greater number of bits. This could be done on a character-by-character basis, in a text file, or could be achieved on a byte-by-byte basis for other files. The following example relates to…