if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?
e.g. flac for lossless audio because…
(yes you can add new categories)
summary:
- photos .jxl
- open domain image data .exr
- videos .av1
- lossless audio .flac
- lossy audio .opus
- subtitles srt/ass
- fonts .otf
- container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
- plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
- documents .odt
- archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
- configuration files toml
- typesetting typst
- interchange format .ora
- models .gltf / .glb
- daw session files .dawproject
- otdr measurement results .xml
.tar.zstd all the way IMO. I’ve almost entirely switched to archiving with zstd, it’s a fantastic format.
The only annoying thing is that the extension for zstd compression is zst (no d). Tar does not recognize a zstd extension, only zst is automatically recognized and decompressed. Come on!
If we’re being entirely honest just about everything in the zstd ecosystem needs some basic UX love. Working with .tar.zst files in any GUI is an exercise in frustration as well.
I think they recently implemented support for chunked decoding so reading files inside a zstd archive (like, say, seeking to read inside tar files) should start to improve sooner or later but some of the niceties we expect from compressed archives aren’t entirely there yet.
Fantastic compression though!
Not sure what that does.
Yes, you can use options to specify exactly what you want. But it should recognize .zstd as zstandard compression instead of going “I don’t know what this compression is”. I don’t want to have to specify the obvious extension just because I typed zstd instead of zst when creating the file.
gzip is very slow compared to zstd for similar levels of compression.
The zstd algorithm is a project by the same author as lz4. lz4 was designed for decompression speed, zstd was designed to balance resource utilization, speed and compression ratio and it does a fantastic job of it.
Gzip is slower and outputs larger compression ratio. Zstandard, on the other hand, is terribly faster than any of the existing standards in means of compression speed, this is its killer feature. Also, it provides a bit better compression ratio than gzip citation_needed.
Yes, all compression levels of gzip have some zstd compression level that is both faster and better in compression ratio.
Additionally, the highest compression levels of zstd are comparable in compression level to LZMA while also being slightly faster in compression and many many times faster in decompression
