Decompress is a verb that refers to minimizing or eliminating compression in a closed place or in a body. The process and result of decompression is called decompression.
Compression is the pressure to which a body is subjected by the action of opposing forces that develop a tendency to reduce its volume. The action of decompressing supposes the opposite procedure, since it implies reducing said compression. See Abbreviation Finder for acronyms related to Decompress.
The interior of an airplane, for example, is pressurized: it has a system to maintain normal atmospheric pressure beyond the external pressure that is recorded by height. A failure, however, can decompress the cabin. Uncontrolled decompression is the unplanned reduction in pressure of a given system.
The idea of ​​decompressing is also used in a symbolic sense with respect to social pressure. When people are angry or upset about something, they may push for an answer or solution. This pressure can even lead to episodes of violence. That is why it is important that the authorities or those responsible for this tension deal with decompressing the situation. Suppose that, in a city, a massive march is held demanding greater security. Faced with this demonstration, the government tries to decompress by announcing that it will increase the number of police officers on the streets and that it will present a bill to aggravate the penalties applied to criminals.
In computing, files can be compressed to a smaller size or weight by removing bits. To open an uncompressed file, it must first be uncompressed.
Thanks to compression, it is possible to store and transmit large files more quickly, either by taking up less disk space, consuming less data when transferring over a network, or speeding up the process. Broadly speaking, we can generalize that text files are the ones that take up less space and, therefore, the ones that are not usually compressed; Of course, it is also possible to do it, and in fact it does not involve great complications.
The types of files that are most often compressed are photo, audio, and movie; the latter are a fusion of the first two types, since they are made up of a large number of images combined with sound files. In order to save money on storage media, companies also use compression to distribute their products such as music and movie discs; as mentioned before, the respective players must uncompress the files before reading them.
Of course, this process can be carried out through various methods, each with its pros and cons. First of all, we must understand that the ideal of compression is to ensure that a file occupies less space without losing its essence, so that it can be recovered when decompressed.
In a nutshell, there are two possible ways to compress a file: with and without data loss. To remove data considered unnecessary or to ensure that they take up less space, various mathematical methods are applied (in more technical terms, we speak of algorithms, that is, a series of steps that are repeated as in a recipe).
Decompressing a large file at runtime, ie at the time it is to be played, requires a lot of processing power. This is very common today, and for this the components of devices such as video game consoles and blu-ray players are made to measure, thinking of this function so that it can be carried out without the need to run a separate program.