Fractal image compression is a promising new technology that may successfully provide a codec for PC-to-PC video communications. Unfortunately, the large amount of computation needed for the compression stage is a major obstacle that needs to be overcome. This paper introduces the Fast Fractal Image Compression algorithm, a new approach to breaking the “speed problem” that has plagued previous efforts.

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/kominek95algorithm.html

by Gerry Melnikov, Aggelos K. Katsaggelos. In this paper a hybrid fractal and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coder is developed.

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/melnikov98non.html

No documentation or hint of how this page was created, but it purports to give you some stats on the frequency of characters in English text.

http://www.sxlist.com/techref/method/compress/etxtfreq.htm

Some simple BASIC routines to compress data without extravagant data or code space. The author seems to indicate this isn’t Huffman coding, but doesn’t say what it is.

http://www.sxlist.com/techref/method/compress/embedded.htm

This System-on-chip provides you with all the building blocks you need to perform several different kinds of compression and decompression, including MPEG, JPEG, and JPEG2000.

http://www.dspworx.com/cheetah.htm

Ultra GIF Optimizer is a powerful tool for optimizing GIF images. It can makes your web page load faster,save your server bandwidth charges and disk space! This is a commercial product, but it looks like you can download it and have a trial session.

http://www.exactcom.com/products/ultragifoptimizer/

The Zinf audio player is a simple, but powerful audio player for Linux and Win32. It supports MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, WAV and Audio CD playback, SHOUTcast/Icecast HTTP streaming, RTP streaming, a powerful music browser, theme support and a download manager. Zinf is based on the FreeAmp source code. However, AMP® is a trademark of PlayMedia Systems, Inc., and therefore the original name of the project cannot be used any longer. On this website the old project will be referred to as FreeA*p.

http://www.zinf.org/

File and database compression components for Delphi. Compress to/from file, memory, and blob. Uses RLE, LZH, and LZW. Shareware.

Version 7.0 was released in September of 2002.

http://www.spis.co.nz/compress.htm

A tool to help you reduce the size of your image files with little or no reduction in image quality. Demo version available, fully functional but stamps output files with a “Demo” label.

http://www.fullyregistered.com/

A position paper from Dr. Klaus Jung and Prof. RuediSeiler, representing Algo Vision LuraTech GmbH. They show in some detail that Forgent’s claims on a patent that covers JPEG are not valid.

Reader John F. said: Goodbye Forgent and your lawyer pals at Jenkens and Gilchrist! We’ll see who has the last laugh on this deal, in the early part of 2003 this story has been very quiet.

http://www.algovision-luratech.com/company/news/statement_seiler_jung_en.pdf

This product is used to convert audio files from one format to another. The programs know how to do various conversions between WMA, MP3, and Ogg Vorbis. It’s also smart enough to do CD ripping. This appears to be shareware.

http://www.litexmedia.com/wma_workshop/

Audio Conversion Wizard is “All to All” converter of digital audio formats with friendly Wizard-style interface, which helps you easily convert:

• WMA to MP3, OGG Vorbis, WAV PCM
• WMA to WMA (resampling)
• MP3 to WMA 8, OGG Vorbis, WAV PCM
• MP3 to MP3 (resampling)
• OGG Vorbis to WMA 8, MP3, WAV PCM
• OGG Vorbis to OGG Vorbis

with ID3 Tag v2 copying and creation.

http://www.litexmedia.com/audio_wizard/

Microsoft’s web page for all things releated to the new Windows Media Player and more. At this time you can download the beta version of the new player, get information, and sample various media.

Reader Serg N. commented: Very good quality, support for [very] low bitrates, lossless mode. It’s not open source, but it’s free!

http://www.windowsmedia.com/9series/home.asp

The goal of DecMPA is to provide simple and efficient MPEG audio decoding routines, nothing more and nothing less. It does not contain any playback functionality - basically you just shove MPEG audio data in and get decoded PCM audio data out. Everything that is not directly connected with MPEG decoding is beyond the scope of this library. This also has the nice side-effect of making DecMPA highly portable because it hardly uses any operating system services at all.

Reader Jacob says: Very easy to use, well documented…

http://decmpa.sourceforge.net/

The folks at Ogg Vorbis would like to see their audio format work its way into some hardware players. One good effort towards making this happen is a fixed=point implementation of the algorithm, which can then presumably be ported to machines using cheaper CPUs that lack the sophisticated FPUs of our desktop machines.

http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/hardware.html

Nice detailed documentation on the structure of an LHA file. If you’re going to attempt to support LHA files, you need a pointer to this doc.

http://homepage1.nifty.com/dangan/en/Content/Program/Java/jLHA/Notes/Notes.html

This site is in Russian, so I am not able to tell you much about it. It has links to some papers, and seems to have a link to PDF files that comprise much of a book on compression.

Reader Dan L. says The best site about comression!

http://compression.graphicon.ru/

The famous paper by David Huffman, as originally published in the Proceedings of the I.R.E.

http://compression.graphicon.ru/download/articles/huff/huffman_1952_minimum-redundancy-cod
es.pdf

A Delphi component. TCompLHA helps you create and manage archives compatible with the popular freeware LHArc and LHA utilities (these archives can also be processed by the popular WinZip program if you have LHA). Simple one-step methods such as Scan, Compress, Expand, Delete and Verify make archive management very easy. In addition it includes the TSegLHA component which allows for the creation of segmented (e.g. multi-disk) archives.

http://www.spis.co.nz/complha.htm

Streambox ACTION is an easy to use video encoding application for serious amateurs and webmasters. ACTION goes beyond simple “file save” routines in video editors, allowing you to interactively optimize your video for specific streaming data rates while preserving video quality. ACTION is specifically designed to produce output optimized for the best progressive download/streaming video player on the market, Apple QuickTime. Convert any DV, AVI. or MOV file into a high quality .MOV file for playing on any QuickTime Player, available for free from Apple.

Reader John G. says Good video codec.

http://www.streambox.com/products/streambox_action.htm

Pegasus Web Services has a new compression algorithm that they say can put 1.2GB on a floppy disk! No demo software yet, but if you’re interested in licensing the technology they are ready to talk.

http://www.fly-pegasus.com/pr_invent.htm

Josh Taylor of ZDNet did a quickie informal comparison of the new Windows Media 9 format and gives it a thumbs-up.

http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2879818,00.html

by John D. Villasenor, Benjamin Belzer, and Judy Liao. A paper discussing the choice of filter bank for wavelet compression. PS format only.

http://www.icsl.ucla.edu/~ipl/Publications/Journal/wavelet_filter_evaluation_for_image_com
pression.pdf

DemoGraFX Inc. is going to be selling their video compression technology to semiconductor companies and system vendors. EE Times has the scoop.

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020904S0029

The voice recording applet SDK is designed for the web developers and allows to record the voice from web site, to compress it and to send to the web server via HTTP. To playback the recorded voice from the server the embedded voice streaming player or a separate player as a voice streaming applet can be used. Both applets are designed in Java 1.1 and has a JavaScript interface.

http://www.vimas.com/ve_record_applet_sdk.htm

This German news item reports on a test that pitched Ogg Vorbis against MP3, Window Media, AAC, and RealAudio. My Babelfish translation says In particular with 64 kBit/s Ogg Vorbis could convince and left the entire prominent competition behind itself. I think that means it won!

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/anw-08.09.02-000/

According to Pete Fraser, you can download three free specifications from the ITU per year, after free registration. This is a great deal - these specs can run into the hundreds of dollars per copy, and if you aren’t near a university library, you may have no other way to get them.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=umpssdh2ls194%40news.supernews.com

This thread reveals the actual dates for the LZW patent expiration, including US, European, and Japanese patents.

http://groups.google.com/groups?&threadm=a5aa8dd0.0208271613.3cd18da6%40posting.google.com

Squeezer is another executable compressor for Windows, and it’s now free. Here’s what you’ll read on the Vidfern web site:

Vidfern Squeezer as the best file compressor, can squeeze executable files as well as text and HTML files. Get more space by squeezing your files! Squeezer is now free for personal and commercial use. It is fully functional, easy and powerful.

Reader Vali from the jp TLD said Thanks to all who create this real good product. I found it a very nice and easy compressor that supports exe, html and text files freely!

http://www.vidfern.7p.com/squeezer/

This directory appears to contain draft standards for H.261, H.263, and H.264.

Note: this site moved to the current ftp location as of 9/15/2002.

ftp://ftp.imtc-files.org/jvt-experts/