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by roboyoshi 3193 days ago
Lossless means that the data is compressed on a bit-level. Has nothing todo with encoding. Similar to WinRAR and ZIP, it probably uses a compression algorithm specific to cloudflare storage to serve the video faster?
1 comments

You can have lossless compressors tailor-made for specific applications who will typically achieve a better compression ratio than the "generic" compression algorithms WinRAR, ZIP and friends use.

For instance try zip'ing a WAV file and compare it to the same file encoded in FLAC. Typically FLAC will achieve better compression while still being lossless.

There are lossless video codecs, like VC-2 for instance. It's not very common in the consumer world however because people generally don't want to stream or store high definition video with a single digit compression factor (that single digit being generally around 2).