The Windleverse

In the windleverse we have done away with lossy codes for the most part. People have realized that more then enough loss takes place when capturing analog signals in a digital form that loosing even more from the file format is not desirable. The people of earth have not yet come to grips with their choices.

In the windleverse we not only have a high speed global wireless network but a massive decentralized storage system. All content is stored in a lossless format which everyone can have access to. Some high resolution video is still streamed in a lossy format to conserve bandwidth but all audio and still picture formats are streamed in lossless. No digital media is ever archived in a lossy format.

The amount of lossy media that is consumed in the real world disturbs and worries me. We are slowly locking ourselfs into media formats that are quickly outdated even if people like to pretend they are not. The MP3 format is a perfect example of an outdated codec still in strong use today.

Lossless codecs are different in that nothing is thrown away. When a new lossless codec comes out you can always decompress and recompress with the new codec without any loss to your orginal file. Once compressed with a lossy codec you are forever doomed to that format.

So please stop using lossy formats for archiving and stop buying lossy media. You are only dooming yourselfs.