Ahmed Ismaiel Zakaria has created a Win32 Zip program that supports Zip files, and is promising to soon support JAR, CAB, ARJ, RAR, ACE, and so on. Yes, there are many other programs just like it, but SmartZip appears to be free and the author is promising to release the source code. (Of course, he’s violating the GPL if he doesn’t offer the source code even with these early releases.) This project is posted on the venerable and esteemed CodeProject site, the author appears to be actively working on the project and communicating on the open forums.

Last updated November 6, 2003. Oh, wouldn’t it be grand if the author posted release notes and a shipment history!

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/SmartZip.asp

This free Zip manager program supports a raft of archiver formats, has full shell integration, and includes support for the Zip64 extensions.

http://www.tugzip.com/

A good description of LZW, along with some specific information about TIFF’s implemenation of this compression algorithm.

http://netghost.narod.ru/gff/graphics/book/ch09_04.htm

Zipserver is a little HTTP server that serves up static documents from inside Zip files. Great way to put manuals or archived documents on line, don’t you think?

http://zipserver.sourceforge.net/en/index.html

Transform is a BWT compressor written by Michael Bone. It supports a number of very interesting features, such as automatic Base 64 representation and image output. Shareware.

Version 1.02 shipped in October, 2003.

http://users.senet.com.au/~mjbone/

This product advertises itself as a simple S3TC texture compression
tool. The description says that it loads an image file into your video card’s RAM, then instructs the video card to compress it.

http://www.hut.fi/~vhelin/boxen.html

ReaCompressor is an image compression tool that is designed to assist you in preparing images for the web, emailing, etc. It lets you choose from various formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, and TIFF, and shows you the results of the compression on screen.

Version 1.8 shipped in October, 2003, and added support for JPG region specific compression and over 340 input formats.

http://www.reasoft.com/products/reacompressor/

A menuing system for playing MPEG movies under Linux. I’m not able to determine exactly what it does, it’s hard to find a good overview. It was originally designed to work with a specific MPEG card, but has apparently grown beyond that.

http://mms.sunsite.dk/

The project to maintain a version of Mozilla that supports MNG format animated graphics.

http://mngzilla.sourceforge.net/

Arcsoft has a line of mobile media codecs that includes support for MIDI, JPEG, PNG, GIF, and speech.

http://www.arcsoft.com/en/wireless/corelibraries.asp

A port of the ever popular Mplayer media player to Apple’s O/S.

http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/

A Java implementation of the inverted-index compression systems described in the book Managing Gigaybtes. This GPLed effort doesn’t appear to have any connection with Witten, Moffat, or Bell.

Version 0.8.2 is shipping in October, 2003.

http://mg4j.dsi.unimi.it/

A Mac OS X utility to shrink the huge PDF files created by the Mac Quartz rendering engine.

http://www.metaobject.com/Products.html#PdfCompress

This program is designed to optimize your HTML source files by removing unnecessary characters, duplicated tags, and so on. Yes, this counts as Data Compression! Note that this link points to the Windows version of the program, but there are also two different Mac versions which you can easily find.

Version 7.82 was shipping in october of 2003.

http://www.tonbrand.nl/optimizer_win.htm

libhuffman is a Huffman encoder/decoder library and a command line interface to the library. The encoder is a 2 pass encoder. The first pass generates a huffman tree and the second pass encodes the file. The decoder is one pass and uses a huffman code table at the beginning of the compressed file to decode the file.

Beta 3 shipped in October, 2003.

http://huffman.sourceforge.net/

This reference page breaks down the structure of an MP3 file quite nicely. Covers all the stuff you’ve wanted to know in detail.

http://www.multiweb.cz/twoinches/MP3inside.htm

LightNzip is a PalmOS system compression and decompression utility.

http://www.toysoft.ca/lightnzip.html

The Center for Next Generation Video is working on a number of research projects dealing with advanced video coding.

http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/CNGV/

The latest in the series of multi-model compressors from Matt Mahoney. This improves on PAQ3n’s remarkable Calgary corpus performance by an additional 12K, at some expense in speed. Takes a whopping 84MB at runtime!

http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/paq4.cpp

This Zip file manager seems to be making its claim to commercial success on two factors. First, it’s 10 bucks cheaper than the big two, PKZip and WinZip. Second, it automatically fixes corrupt archives. (Although I’d love to see a discussion of just how well it does this.)

http://www.4zip.com/winzip.htm

Matt Mahoney says that with recent improvements by Serge Osnach, PAQ3N does better on the Calgary Corpus than any other open source compressor.

http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/paq3n.cpp

Michael Dipperstein describes his personal quest for understanding an implementation of Huffman coding. Full source included.

The page was updated with new source December, 2002.

http://michael.dipperstein.com/huffman/index.html

A free SFX Maker with some nice features.

http://www.powerprogrammer.co.uk/stubbie.htm

This site appears to the home page for a project dedicated to developing an Open Source X Windows compression library.

http://www.nomachine.com/developers.php

It appears that the technology promised by Adam Clark has found a buyer. MWC is paying $11 million for the IP that is reputed to be able to create a full-screen video experience over normal voice lines.

http://www.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20031001/pdf/3j7tqwvlr3y77.pdf

DualStream is aimed at filling the big gap between perceptual coding and lossless coding. The goal is to offer real transparent audio coding (not only perceptually transparent) at half or less the bitrate generally used by lossless coding, and also to permit progressive consistent increase of the quality level, until lossless coding is reached. To eliminate the problem of choosing between lossless and near lossless, DualStream has an option to create a correction file, which may be eventually stored separately and used at a later time to restore the original. The advantage is that the two files (near lossless and correction) have together approximately the size of the lossless coded original file.

http://losslessaudiocompression.com/DualStream.php

A lossless compressor for audio data stored as IEEE floating point data.

http://losslessaudiocompression.com/IEEE_Float.php

OptimFROG is a lossless audio compressor. Lots of claims for great performance!

OptimFROG 4.507 is shipping as of October, 2003. Features added since my last report include numerous bug fixes and performance tweaks. The author claims to have superior lossless compression ratios, includes numerous player plugins, and is free for non-commercial use.

Version 4.507 is shipping as of October, 2003.

http://ghido.shelter.ro/

ImageGear from Accusoft is a super-capable imaging library, available in four different varieties. It supports the normal roster of file types, but also includes some more advanced image and file formats, such as PDF and JPEG-2000.

Version 13 is shipping as of October, 2003.

http://accusoft.com/imaging/imagegear/ig_about.asp

Star is a free tar program, and boasts that it is the first free tar program to support POSIX.1-2001 extended tar headers.

http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/star.html