The video title is in fact not quite accurate -- I chose to err in the direction of "cool soundbyte", since "LZ77 + poetry = awesome" doesn't have quite the sam

The video title is in fact not quite accurate -- I chose to err in the direction of "cool soundbyte", since "LZ77 + poetry = awesome" doesn't have quite the same ring. aortega is quite right that this video actually explains LZ77, which is only one part of how gzip compresses. gzip (or the DEFLATE algorithm) also uses Huffman coding to compress the alphabet and pointers after LZ77 compression. I explain a bit more about the phases at http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/10/23/day-15-how-gzip-works http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/10/23/day-15-how-gzip-works And if you really want to know how it works, you should read http://www.infinitepartitions.com/art001.html http://www.infinitepartitions.com/art001.html, which is the reference I used for writing my implementation of gunzip. It includes C source code. The dig at hacker schoolers was unnecessary, though :)