System and method for processing time-based media such as sequences of images, audio sequences, and the like on a computing device such as a personal computer. A method may comprise receiving a plurality of sample data, processing the sample data based on a type of the sample data, and returning a plurality of processed sample data. The processing may include performing video compression of the sample data if the sample data is video, including identifying difficult to compress frames by determining a color frequency chart for each video frame and comparing the color frequency charts of neighboring video frames. The processing may also include performing either speech to text translation or speech compression when the sample data is voice, performing music compression when the sample data is music, and performing either text to speech translation or performing language translation if the sample data is text.