x264 is a free library for encoding H264/AVC video streams. It is released under the terms of the GPL license.

http://videolan.org/developers/x264.html

Sebastian Deorowicz decided to create a compression corpus of his own, attempting to overcome some of the deficiencies he sees in the old guard.

http://sun.iinf.polsl.gliwice.pl/~sdeor/corpus.htm

David Cary is a major link farmer. One of the sections of his massive Data Compression page has links to various images and files that are used in various benchmarks.

http://agora.rdrop.com/~cary/html/data_compression.html#benchmark

The folks at LIVE conducted a subjective test of images at various compression levels, and have made the results available here. The images and results are both available here.

http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/quality/

Part 4 of the standard relates to conformance. The files on this site are used in conformance testing. This web site implies that this part of the standard will soon be available for free, but as of March, 2003, this is not the case.

http://www.crc.ricoh.com/~gormish/jpeg2000conformance/

Jürgen Abel has a great Data Compression site, and keeps a set of pointers to standard sets of files used for compression. He recently added a reference to the Protein Corpus, a set of difficult to compress files that were first published at the 1999 Data Compression Conference.

http://www.data-compression.info/Corpora/

This page contains links to sample code and test data for implementing the JPEG 2000 standard. Looking for conformance files? This is the place. Looking for working implementations? You can find several here.

http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg2000/testlinks.html

Google’s directory entry point for test images used in data compression.

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Algorithms/Compression/Test_Images/

This is described as the ftp server for the Video Coding Experts Group, which is working on H.26L and other video projects. A ton of stuff here, no guideposts or indices, have at it.

ftp://standard.pictel.com/video-site/

This site has a nice collection of codecs, including DirectShow filters, MPG4, MJPEG, and other video codecs. A few audio codecs and AVI test sequences as well.

http://dshow.narod.ru/

Welcome to media.xiph.org, a repository for freely-redistributable test sets. We use these to test our codecs, and hope you will too. This site includes a partial mirror of the Video Quality Experts Group test sequences as well.

http://media.xiph.org

This program is currently capable of reading and extracting files made with LHA and other utilities that generate .lzh files, from -lh4- to -lh7-. The foundation of the algorithm for this program like ARJ is based on Haruhiko Okumura’s work on ar002, which was the foundation of LHA. Unlike Haruhiko’s work however, the dictionary size is dynamic and currently allows for dictionary sizes of up to 64KB. On larger files, compression of files is usually 0.5% to 5% tighter than PKzip, and work in progress will likely yield even better results. Files created with this utility natively create -lh7- signed archives, which on larger files results in slightly better compression than that of lha32 by Haruyasu Yoshizaki.

http://www.programfiles.com/index.asp?ID=6767

No details, but it appears to be a collection of files designed to represent a slightly wider range of modern applications.

http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~tim/corpus/ftp/cantrbry.tar.gz

Images commonly used in compression tests are stored here in Sun raster format. At this time I believe that all you will find here are gray scale images.

ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/graphics/misc/test-images/

Some speech samples that have been encoded at various rates using various codecs. If you’ve never heard speech encoded at 1.4 Kbps, here’s a chance to check it out.

http://www.hawksoft.com/hawkvoice/codecs.shtml

A list of links to test images. Utopia for the benchmark junkie.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/cil/ftp/html/v-images.html

Peter Cherriman’s page on H.263 coding, includes information, pointers, and a couple of demo sequences.

http://rice.ecs.soton.ac.uk/peter/h263/h263.html

Peter Cherriman’s page on H.261 coding, includes information, pointers, and a couple of demo sequences.

http://rice.ecs.soton.ac.uk/peter/h261/h261.html

A set of links to files that are used to benchmark various data compression algorithms.

http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~nasir/work/benchmark/

This site apparently holds a set of files that were used to evaluate MPEG audio compression algorithms.

http://sound.media.mit.edu/mpeg4/audio/sqam/

Links to lots of info regarding the audio compression portions of the MPEG standards. This includes an overview, the MPEG Audio FAQ, pointers to resources, some free software, and test bitstreams.

http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/audio.html

In the BragZone you will find the following:

• A suite of test images, the “Waterloo Repertoire”.
  
• Rate-Distortion plots for various compression codecs.
  
• The data from which the above plots are derived.
  
• Sample images at selected compression ratios.