BT Introduces PowerPressed for Compressing PowerPoint Files
Posted by Sachin Garg on 26th February 2006 | Permanent Link
BT Wholesale has announced PowerPressed, a software tool that claims compresses PowerPoint presentations to as little as 5% of their original size. Here are some excerpts from the press release:
Traditional ‘zipping’ applications based on binary compression technology are unable to significantly reduce the size of a PowerPoint file, especially when it contains images. PowerPressed uses a compression technology based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), a method developed to exploit the particular properties of image data. This delivers much more effective compression than binary compression can achieve, allowing PowerPressed to reduce the file by up to 95%.
Once the file has been compressed, the .ppt file extension is maintained, allowing the file to be used as a normal PowerPoint presentation. The recipient of the file does not need any proprietary plug-ins or viewers and the presentation does not need to be ‘unzipped’ in any way.
The press release also contains a lot of text explaining how PPT files usually get to big, and how they waste space and how important bandwidth is. But as far as data compression part is concerned, all they are saying can be summarized as “they convert images to jpeg”.
February 26th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
I concur with the idea that what is happening here is that some manipulation of the image content is contributing to the overall reduction of file size.
However, it would require more than this to reduce the file size by over 80% in size so I suspect that this product involves a number of other processes other than straight forward image reduction converting to jpeg….especially if the images have already been compressed as jpegs during the presentation creation phase.
February 27th, 2006 at 12:46 am
I just summarized what was said in the press release.
And the way press release tried to use ‘heavy’ words to describe the simple image conversion, is also strange :-)
Maybe they are doing more, but I had read their FAQ and other documentation, and it seems that they are most probably not doing anything else. They have described the case of PPT already containing jpeg files, and say that they re-encode such files to lower quality.
There are many other competing products, so I guess what we need now is an honest benchmark comparing all of them on ‘real world’ files (not on carefully articulated files).
February 27th, 2006 at 1:23 am
Even JPEG would seem to be a strange and exciting technology to the developers of this product.
If you read through the help files on their website at
http://fortressgate.net/support/WebHelp/PowerPressed_Help.htm
you will see that all the images are provided as BMP format.
It’s not a stunning recommedation for an image compression product when the website uses a non-compressed format that is so rarely seen on the web (for good reason).
February 27th, 2006 at 4:11 am
Nice observation. I agree with you on the ‘recommendation’ part. I would expect makers of a compression tool to understand compression.
ps, I have fixed the link to your blog, you missed the ‘.’ between zmarties and blogspot :-)
February 27th, 2006 at 4:14 am
I have downloaded the free evaluation version of the product refered to in the British Telecom PR piece.
It certainly appears to handle more than image reduction. I suspect that it has been designed to optimise much of the redundancy that Microsoft so often includes in its file formats especially PowerPoints.
I would consider this to be more of a general optimisation tool other than simply an image compression product which is possibly why British Telecom has agreed to distribute it as part of its own ‘Digital Compression Suite’….not sure what the other products are that comprise the suite.
February 27th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Microsofts newer XML based file format has compression built-in. And free updates will be available for older versions of MS Office. Check this post:
Compressed XML based files formats in Microsoft Office 12
Save your money for better use Robert :-)
February 28th, 2006 at 1:04 am
Thank you for the link to the XML post which I have read.
MS informs that the XML file formats of Office 12 will include a binary (lossless) compression as a default. Binary compression or lossless is in effect ‘zip’. Any of us who have used ‘zip’ will appreciate that zip compression does not in fact reduce digital images files.
MS Office 12 FAQ’s explictly state that the Office 12 XML compression will NOT compress digital images. This appears to bring us back to square one in relation to digital images that are embedded into MS PowerPoint presentations.
Thank you for sharing your views with me. Rob