Thanks for sharing your experience – this is a fair point. Often it is possible to pre-process your data and save it to disk so that you can skip this decompres

Thanks for sharing your experience – this is a fair point. Often it is possible to pre-process your data and save it to disk so that you can skip this decompression/conversion/transformation step once you start training your net, but I can image applications where this is impractical or just does not work. I will add a small note to my blog about this.