Re: Script to conditionally find and compress files recursively

On 12/06/2024 11:21, Grant Taylor wrote:

On 6/11/24 01:53, J Newman wrote:

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

 As others have said, it's very difficult to tell within the first five seconds what the ultimate compression ratio will be.
 If you have the disk space, compress using all of the compression options and then remove all but the smallest file.
 Then go on to the next file.
  

It's true that you cannot tell within the first 5 seconds what the ultimate compression ratio will be, but it seems to me (from compressing avi/mp4/mov files with lzma -9evv) that you can tell within +/- 5% to a high degree of confidence, what the ultimate compression ratio will be given the first 5 seconds.