Soft Defender is a good exe file compressor, which can reduce the file size of 32-bit Windows programs by as much as 50%.In addition, Soft Defender is a perfect product of software protection of applications.With Soft Defender, your application can have anti-debugging, anti-tracer, anti-disassemble, anti-dumping, anti-apihook, file integrity checking functions in seconds. It requires no source code editing or your registration algorithm changing.

http://www.softdefender.com/

Compreso implements compressed sockets using an LZH algorithm, as implemented by Rolando Herrero. It does this cooperatively with the Win32 socket library, so you can only run this code under Windows. Freeware.

http://www.compreso.com.ar/compreso.htm

CoolPlayer is a nice, fast MP3 player targeted to Windows. This Open Source project is a nice piece of work, and the team has created a player that has the features to compete with good commercial players.

Build 214 of CoolPlayer shipped in June, 2003.

http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/

This product takes your text, converts it to speech, then stores the result in one of several compressed formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and G.721.

http://www.visual-mp3.com/text-to-speech/

This article on The Code Project web site shows you how to calculate a CRC, but even better it shows you how to create a file that will have a given CRC value.

http://codeproject.com/useritems/crcspoof.asp

This tutorial provides a useful class that lets you access the ID3 tags hidden in most MP3 files.

http://codeproject.com/useritems/MP3FileInfo.asp

Freezip, by Dariusz Stanislawek, is a completely
free Win32 application that does the usual job of zipping and
unzipping files, and includes full integration with Windows
Explorer.

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/

DIUcl is a freeware port of UCL to Borland’s Delphi language. UCL is the compressor used in the UPX Ultimate Packer for Executables by Markus F.X.J. Oberhumer. Decompression is extremely fast, and requires very little memory. The author claims that the decompressor fits into less than 200 bytes of code. Supports in-place compression and decompression. Using DIUcl is very simple: There’s a compress() function that compresses a block of memory, and there’s a decompress() function that handles decompression.
Real-time decompression should be possible for virtually any application, which makes DIUcl the ideal tool to compress your database Blob fields.

Version 1.10 is shipping as of June, 2003.

http://www.zeitungsjunge.de/delphi/ucl/index.htm

This book by David MacKay can be downloaded chapter by chapter and printed out for free. No indication that you can buy a hardcopy, although Amazon.com claims it will be published in January, 2002. Please read this 600 page tome and provide a review for this space!

Update: The author tells me this book will be published in November, 2003. The book will remain viewable on his website!

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itprnn/book.html

SheerVideo is a QuickTime video codec. Looks like they currently only support the Mac platform, but Linux and Windows support is promised soon.

http://www.bitjazz.com/sheervideo/

This open source Linux project performs a very specialized task. It is used to repair images that have single pixel errors, such as that you might get from a camera with a single bad spot on the CCD. It interpolates from the neighboring pixels to create a new value, then inserts it without a decompress/recompress cycle. Pretty neat!

http://jpegpixi.sourceforge.net/

Software to convert the proprietary KDC files produced by Kodak digital cameras into JPEG or TIFF format. Appears to work under Linux only.

http://kdc2tiff.sourceforge.net/

Convert your CHM help files from Microsoft to Adobe’s PDF format. This is shareware that runs on Win32 platforms.

http://www.colorpilot.com/chm2pdf.html

This CodeProject article describes the development of a PATRICIA trie in the .NET framework. The actual code is written in C#, but naturally, it can be used with any of the .NET languages.

http://codeproject.com/useritems/PatriciaTrie.asp

UFUP advertises itself as a “decompression utility that handles common Unix package formats such as bzip2, gzip, and tar.”

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ufup/

Maaate consists of a set of libraries that let you analyze the audio streams encoded in MPEG files. Besides simply parsing the audio out of MPEG files, it also does some sort of energy detection, silence analysis and more. But reading between the lines I think this library’s strength is supposed to be a nice architecture that lets you easily add the modules you need for your work.

http://www.cmis.csiro.au/maaate/

Robert Estes (UCDavis - image compression research). Robert has pointers to many of his papers on this page. He has info on Wavelet-based image compression, image compression, plus some peripherally related topics such as image quality.

http://msp.cipic.ucdavis.edu/~estes/

Polar Zip is a Win32 component that provides all the compression and archiving features you could ever need. Use with any development environment that can accept an ActiveX control.

Polar has added a .NET version of their Zip component in May, 2003.

http://www.polarsoftware.com/

iRad is an open source project written to view DICOM files
on your Mac systems running OS X. For those of you not in
the know, DICOM is a set of standards for storing and accessing
medical imagery. It is written to help with the unique requirements
that the medical industry has for imaging.

Version 1.4 is shipping in a beta version in May, 2003.

http://irad.sourceforge.net/

This is a somewhat unique utility that will only be useful to those of you working on Visual Studio programming projects. Running it erases all your temporary project files, then zips up all the leftovers so you can backup your work.

http://codeproject.com/file/CleanZipAndGo.asp

This open source project gives you the ability to read and write AVI files under Linux. The really interesting part about all that is that this is done using the Win32 DLLs from Microsoft to do the compression and decompression. Clever!

The avifile component is shipping version 0.7.37 as of May, 2003.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/avifile/

An article on MSDN describing the plugin architecture of Windows Media Player 9.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwmt/html/Connect_plugin
s.asp

A free Win32 media player that can handle quite a few popular audio and video formats.

Reader Brian H. says: Incredibly fast, and has just the features that I need.

http://www.madebyhenry.com/player/

Advanced Zip Repair(AZR) is a powerful tool to repair corrupted Zip and self-extracting(SFX) files. It can recover your data in Zip archives as much as possible, so to minimize the loss in file corruption.

Version 1.6 is shipping in May, 2003.

http://www.repairfile.com/

A quick tutorial on how and why to use HTTP compression when delivering your web pages.

http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/asafras/http_compression.htm

Tar and tar.gz files are very familiar to *NIX users, but not to everyone using Windows. To help those folks out, ezGZ has been created, which manipulates these archives in a nice GUI-friendly way. Source included.

http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/staff/cr1/gz.html

This MSDN article describes how to use the java.utl.zip package with a C# program. Includes a sample GUI Zip application.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/06/ZipCompression/default.aspx

This is a free Linux program that allows you to edit your compressed video files. It is still in beta, and the docs and online help are very minimal at the time I’m writing this.

Version 0.90 is shipping as of May, 2003.

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

An effort to develop a nice QuickTime client for the Linux world, along with the possibility of an encoder and more.

Beta release 0.5 of the client is shipping as of May, 2003.

http://www.openquicktime.org/

Corona is an image input/output library that can read, write, and manipulate image files in just a few lines of code. It can write PNG files, and read PNG, JPEG, PCX, BMP, TGA, and GIF. Corona was designed to be easy to use, and exports a straightforward C++ API. With just a few lines of C++, you can add image loading to your application.

Corona 1.0.1 shipped in May, 2003, and added support for TGA images as well as a few more functions.

http://corona.sourceforge.net/