Newbie Question Thread

[Tmills]

From my understanding.

Reflate: is decompression. It takes a compressed data stream and reconstructs the original uncompressed data before feeding it to another compression tool.

Preflate: is precompression. It takes uncompressed data and pre-processes it before feeding it to another compression tool.

Xtool 2020:mzlib is also precompression. It takes uncompressed data and pre-processes it before feeding it to another compression tool.

Reflate:
Input: Compressed data
Output: Uncompressed data (original data before compression)
Example is using reflate on .ftex file. mzlib does nothing to it as it's a compressed file, however reflate will uncompress it so you can recompress it with LOLZ/LZMA2 for a smaller file size.

Mzlib & Preflate:
Input: Uncompressed data
Output: Pre-compressed data (prepared for further compression)


Is that correct? If so, what is the actual difference from mzlib and preflate. Is just the algorithm they use?