Mark Adler built a decompressor that is able to read streams built with PKWare’s Data Compression Library. Since PKWare hasn’t released source for DCL, this is a very good thing, and free to boot.

http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~madler/blast10.tar.gz

The author created this site to make LZOP readily available. The page has links to download binaries, plus links to other LZO and LZOP sites.

http://www.lzop.de/

A recent post to comp.compression had a pointer to this page, identifying it as a source of H.263 software. Sure enough, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you’ll find links to an H.263 decoder, plus a Windows H.263 player. Not to mention some Wavelet code from JP, and a few other interesting links.

http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/Lab/2336/wave.html

Gilad Novik created a pair of classes to compress and decompress data using the bzip2 format.

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/BZ2Class.asp

Driver and software for the jazPiper(tm) MP3 player.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openjaz/

Bloat is a Perl script which analyses an archive’s filename and extracts it using a suitable extractor.

http://bloat.sourceforge.net/

This product bills itself as the “Ultimate Multilingual User Friendly” compression tool. The usual Zip features plus support for six different languages. Fifteen day free trial download.

Reader Donald J. says Excellent zip utility and definitely the easiest I have ever used.

http://www.ezzipsuitcase.com/

Anand Jain discusses his new technique for arithmetic coding. An executable file is included, but no source code.

http://www.anand-jain.8m.com/

A complete Zip compression library for Win32 programmers in a 50K DLL.

Version 3.02 of this DLL shipped in May of 2002.

http://www.bigspeedsoft.com/bszipdll/bszipdll.html

A free unzip program for Win32. This is currently on release 4.0, but I’m not sure when it shipped.

http://www.camdevelopment.com/cam_unzip/default.htm

BigSpeed Zip OCX is a multi-threaded, fully self-contained ActiveX control, which lets you add zipping and unzipping capabilities to any 32-bit Windows application.

Version 2.1.0.26 of this library shipped in March of 2001.

http://www.bigspeedsoft.com/bszipocx/bszipocx.html

mod_zipvfs is an Apache2 module, that gives the httpd server the ability to read and browse zipped archives and allows traversal of their content like a virtual filesystem. It is very useful for browsing large html-based documentation without need of decompressing.

http://modzipvfs.sourceforge.net/

T. Strutz offers up an overview and taxonomy of Data Compression. If you’re looking for the big picture, this might be a good place to start. A PowerPoint presentation is available for download as well - might be just the thing if you only have an hour left to prepare that lecture!

http://www-nt.e-technik.uni-rostock.de/~ts/Datacompression/compression.html

Compressia is a BWT-based archive utility with particularly high compression ratios. On Calgary, Canterbury, ACT-Text and ACT-Exe it surpasses all other BWT utilities. On Canterbury corpus it also surpasses all PPM utilities. Beta version 1.0 is available on the web site as of February, 2003.

DataCompression.info reader Juan L. said It is by far the best I’ve tried.

http://www.Compressia.com

An archiver that supports 31 formats. ArchiveXP uses the 7-Zip compression format to handily beat Zip-based compressors when it comes to archive size.

SP83 of ArchiveXP 2003 was released in January of 2003.

http://www.cyberspacehq.com/products/codex/home.shtm

The LuraWave OCX is an OLE-Control ready to be integrated into numerous development environments such as MS Visual C++, MS Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, and several of the MS Office components. This product allows you to easily load and decompress Lurawave images, as well as converting to/from TIFF and BMP formats. A demo version is available which limits you to 640×480 pixels.

http://www.algovision-luratech.com/products/lurawave/ocx_sdk

From the SourceForge site:

Guntar is the lazy man’s decompression, untar, utility. Do you download a lot of source? Do you keep forgetting the tar flags to decompress zipped archives? If so Guntar is for you.

Looks as though the 0.4.2 beta release of Guntar shipped at the end of January, 2003.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/guntar/

DVDx is a tool that allows you to convert DVD to VCD2.0 , SCVD1.0 or AVI (DivX…) in one step (Including multiplexing, splitting). It produces good quality movies in AVI , MPEG1/2 format and you don’t need to have 5GB or more free on your hard disk. DVDx has been designed especially for inexperienced users, it is a simple and intuitive program.

Version 2.1 of DVDx shipped in January of 2003.

http://dvdx.sourceforge.net/

PKWare’s page for PKZip. Currently offering four flavors of PKZip for Windows, and a big mess of versions for UNIX.

Version 6.0 of PKZip appears of have shipped in January of 2003.

http://pkware.com/products/isb/index.html

This product is an addon to the THBImage Library. The Library is available as either a DLL or OCX, and supports a wide variety of image formats and operations. An 30-day evaluation version is available for download.

http://www.thbcomponents.com/products/prthbjpeg2000.html

This is a first shot at wrapping zlib compression library behind a COM IStream interface. The library provides a pure ATL C++ implementation and a simple demo COM based implementation. Both take an IStream as an initializer and compress/decompress on the fly on the Read and Write methods.

http://www.codeproject.com/atl/zlibstream.asp

Tony Lin created some classes that can read these three popular image formats, and includes an MFC demo app. The Jasper coder is used for JEPG2K support.

http://www.codeproject.com/bitmap/TonyJpegLib.asp

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 has links to the big batch of downloads that developers might need to work with Windows Media 9. At this time, the list of available packages includes:

• Windows Media Format 9 Series SDK
• Windows Media Player 9 Series SDK
• Windows Media Encoder 9 Series SDK
• Microsoft Windows Media Player for Pocket PC SDK
• Windows Media Format 7 SDK for Macintosh
• Windows Media Services SDK

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/downloads/list/winmedia.asp

Vprove is a PC-based software package that analyzes video streams. It is intended as a way for developers to optimize their compressors, doing such things as analysis of motion estimation and image clarity. The product works with H.261, H.263, and MPEG-4 streams. This is a sophisticated product with many interesting features, if you are a content creator or develop content creation tools, you need to check it out.

http://www.vqual.biz/Vprove.html

A Q/A column in JavaWorld magazine from 12/2002. The article answers a couple of questions regarding how a Java programmer can zip up data resident in memory, as opposed to files. The second Q/A was particularly interesting as it addresses a quest to zip up data being passed through RMI in particular app.

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/javaqa/2001-12/01-qa-1207-ziprmi.html

This article gives a good look at how to use the java.util.zip classes that showed up in JDK 1.1. Todd Sunsted includes java source that shows you how to easily compress files using standard library functions.

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-1998/jw-11-howto.html

FLAC is an open-source project which specifies a lossless compressed audio format and provides an encoder, decoder, and several player plugins. Aside from yielding better compression than Shorten, the format supports sample-accurate seeking and many other features useful for streaming and archival.

Reader Colin B. says: Incredible lossless audio compression, depending on the source, of course. I have seen high-quality speech recordings compressed to 10% of the original size, losslessly..

FLAC 1.1.0 released in January, 2003. A good roster of new features for this coder, including updates for libraries and plugins.

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

This step-by-step guide has links to the appropriate software along with specific instructions on how to perform the encoding process. (No help on how to rip content of your DVDs, but that information can be found on the net.)

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,848187,00.asp

This project provides an implementation of the java.util.zip classes. The code is pure java (no native code is used), and aims to be compatible with existing java.util.zip implementations.

Version 0.06 of jazzlib shipped in January of 2003. This product is still under development, but I don’t have a clear roadmap, no idea when to expect a 1.0 release.

http://jazzlib.sourceforge.net/