Comment by rwmj

Seekable formats also allow random reads which lets you do trickery like booting qemu VMs from remotely hosted, compressed files (over HTTPS). We do this already for xz: https://libguestfs.org/nbdkit-xz-filter.1.html https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/nbdkit-xz-curl/

Has zstd actually standardized the seekable version? Last I checked (which was quite a while ago) it had not been declared a standard, so I was reluctant to write a filter for nbdkit, even though it's very much a requested feature.