The cinema compression algorithm was implemented in real life.
During an intense workday, Dropbox developers brought to life the fictional Pied Piper algorithm from the Silicon Valley television series.
Within days of encoding, we managed to get a working solution based on OpenH264, which demonstrates up to 13% compression for H.264 videos and 22% for arbitrary JPEG files, the publication reports. In this case, we are talking about honest lossless compression, when the compressed file can be returned to its original state with bit precision.
The source code for Pied Piper (losslessh264) is released under the free BSD license.
The developers of the Pied Piper codec copied everything from the movie: its functionality (compression and decompression of files without loss of quality), and even the name.
A “prank” development can save Dropbox a lot of money, as the company stores exabytes of files on its servers. Even a 1% savings allows you to get rid of at least 50 server racks, what can we say about compression by 13-22%, the journalists calculated.
Dropbox put ten programmers on this project at once. They are fine-tuning the version of the codec originally created during the hackathon.
Lead developer Daniel Reiter Horn says the algorithm fixes some legacy and ineffective encoding methods used to compress H.264 and JPEG files.
