Compression Artifacts

When aggressive data comprssion is applied to image, audio or video, some data may be discarded if its deemed too complex to store at the current data-rate, or if the algorithm decides that the information is of little importance. Compression artifacts occur because of the latent errors in the process or basically the extreme result of overzealous lossy data compression.

Compression artifacts occur in many common media such as DVDs, common computer file formats such as JPEG, MP3, or MPEG files, and Sony's ATRAC compression algorithm. Uncompressed media (such as on Laserdiscs, Audio CDs, and WAV files) or losslessly compressed media (FLAC, PNG, etc.) do not suffer from compression artifacts.