> Once you remove bits of information from the original it's lost for ever and no new hi tech so called lossless codec will help.
Wrong
Once the information is in the digital domain you can compression with out ANY loss in which case it will have NO degradation.
You are comparing two things
Loss based compression (Thats what happens when you REMOVE information.)
Lossless compression (Nothing is is lost)
Lossless compression is a compression technique that does not lose any data in the compression process.
Lossless compression "packs data" into a smaller file size by using a kind of internal shorthand to signify redundant data. If an original file is 1.5MB (megabytes), lossless compression can reduce it to about half that size, depending on the type of file being compressed.
For example:
The zip convention, used in programs like WinZip, uses lossless compression. For this reason zip software is popular for compressing program and data files. That's because when these files are decompressed, all bytes must be present to ensure their integrity. If bytes are missing from a program, it won't run.
Lossless compression has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the compressed file will decompress to an exact duplicate of the original file, mirroring its quality. The disadvantage is that the compression ratio is not all that high, precisely because no data is lost.
I hope that clears this up for you.