Despite the protestations, you can use LAME to create MP3 streams. It does it with the magic of the ISO demo code. LAME isn’t lame, lots of people seem to like it.

http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/

IZArc is a free multi-format archiver. Supports the following formats: ACE, ARC, ARJ, BH, BZ2, CAB, ENC, GZ, HA, JAR, LHA, LZH, MBF, MIM, PAK, PK3, RAR, TAR, TBZ, TGZ, UUE, XXE, Z, ZIP, ZOO. Pretty good list, wouldn’t you say?

http://free.top.bg/izsoft/

CHAOS Self-Extractor is a utility program that creates self-extracting ZIP files for Windows. CHAOS supports a form of encryption that it claims is much stronger than standard Zip encryption.

http://www.safechaos.com/chse.htm

#ziplib (SharpZipLib, formerly NZipLib) is a Zip, GZip, Tar and BZip2 library written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. It is implemented as an assembly (installable in the GAC), and thus can easily be incorporated into other projects (in any .NET language). The creator of #ziplib put it this way: “I’ve ported the zip library over to C# because I needed gzip/zip compression and I didn’t want to use libzip.dll or something like this. I want all in pure C#.”

Visitor Samuel L. had this to say Extremely useful and well written, well done, great that is open source.

http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/Default.aspx

Sachin Garg’s article and source on arithmetic coding, includes a 64-bit implementation.

http://www.geocities.com/schngrg/sgarith.html

Squeez is a fast file compression application, supporting many different archive formats. It reads and writes files in the formats ACE, ARJ, BZIP, CAB, GZIP, LZH, RAR, SQX, TAR, UUE and ZIP without any additional software. Unlike many other archivers, Squeez can read and write ZIP files (so called Zip64 archives) that have no limits regarding their maximum size or the maximum number of files within. The new SQX archive format supported by Squeez is an open archive format without any limits regarding the maximum archive size or the maximum number of files within. Special compression algorithms for executables (EXE, DLL) and multimedia files as well as a fast compressor for WAV files can usually compress content 8 to 30 percent better than ZIP or ARJ files.

http://www.speedproject.de/enu/squeez/index.html

ZipStar is a free archiving application for home users. It can create, modify and extract the archive formats SQX, CAB and ZIP. Besides the application itself, ZipStar also provides an extension for the Windows Explorer. With this extension it is possible to extract or create archives directly within Windows Explorer.

ZipStar may be used free of charge if you

• are a student, teacher or some other kind of member of a teaching facility (public/private school or university);
• use the software exclusively for private and non-profit purposes.

http://www.speedproject.de/enu/zipstar/index.html

A C implementation of Shapiro’s EZW algorithm. Performance is close/better than the reported results with the wavelet filters.

http://pesona.mmu.edu.my/~msng/EZW.html

Ian Kaplan’s Wavelet and Signal Processing page has lots of articles and C++/Java source code implementing wavelet transform via the lifting scheme, the integer-to-integer wavelet transform and the best basis wavelet packet transform

http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_tech/wavelets/index.html

A file archive utility written in VB. Compression and decompression routines are LZSS. Full source code included.

http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=29329&lngWId=1

DjVu is an image compression technique that is meant to be used on scanned documents. AT&T has created a browser plugin that supports DjVu files. AT&T claims that DjVu files are 5 to 8 times smaller than GIF or JPEG images of similar quality. Some public source code is provided here, but the exciting parts of DjVu are not available.

Update: I believe this project has morphed away from AT&T and into the Open Source World. The AT&T site has been gone since 6/2002, I hope that this represents its new incarnation. I’m also moving the project status from Commercial to Non-Commercial

http://www.djvuzone.org/

PhD thesis by Éric Rivals.

http://www.lirmm.fr/~rivals/Publication/These/PhD.html

Links to the articles from this journal dating back to 1988. If you’re not an IEEE member, you only get to see the abstracts! Membership in the IEEE plus a few extra bucks lets you download here to your heart’s content.

Update: Site has moved due to redesign.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?puNumber=18

This page has a number of papers related to the DjVu compression format. Papers are all posted in ps.gz and DjVu formats. Note that you’ll need the DjVu plugin to read them in that format.

http://www.djvuzone.org/techpapers/index.html

The UPL Compression Library is a high-performance professional compression library. It offers the ability to compress and decompress data, buffers, strings or single files and features the latest innovations in data compression. The library offers eight extremely powerful compression algorithms. Dynamic Huffman, Arithmetic, BWT, Ppm and several Lempel Ziv flavors.

DataCompression.info user John G. had this to say: I was looking for adding a better compression to my Visual Basic project and it worked like a charm. The compression ratio is really good, better than Zip!

http://www.uplib.com/

by Moffat, Neal, and Witten. The authors of the original CACM article on arithmetic coding take a fresh look at the topic with an additional ten years of knowledge.

http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~ronir/courses/advancedTopics/pubs/moffat.pdf

WinImp has been re-released as freeware. This archiver can create Zip files, and extract from the usual list of Zip, ARJ, RAR, and so on. It includes a couple of proprietary (BWT-based?) algorithms that purport to do well on text files.

DataCompression.info user Mike notes that It includes 2 very good
compression methods and only the new versions of Winrar, Winace or Rk can compete with the compression ratios of Winimp.

http://www.technelysium.com.au/winimp.html

ZipMagic gives you transparent access to Zip files via the technology from the ZipFolders product. Treat archive files as if they were ordinary folders. ZipMagic of course contains a number of other nice features.

http://www.ontrack.com/zipmagic/

This page gives a short introduction to the DICOM standard, commonly used for medical imaging. It has a lengthy set of links to DICOM viewers, images, and other resources.

http://www.psyc.nott.ac.uk/staff/cr1/dicom.html

Intel has created a new library designed to deal with varous primitives used in Data Compression. Intel says: Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) is a software library which provides a range of library functions for multimedia, audio codecs, video codecs (for example H.263, MPEG-4), image processing (JPEG), signal processing, speech compression (i.e. G.723, GSM ARM*) plus computer vision as well as math support routines for such processing capabilities.Unlike their previous libraries, this is now a commercial product which is going to cost you as much as $199. Works with Windows and Linux.

http://developer.intel.com/software/products/ipp/ipp30/overview.htm

This imaging library from PegasusImaging supports reading and writing of a wide variety of compressed image formats, including JPEG, GIF, and PNG. JPEG2000 and Lossless JPEG are advertised as available with add-on packages.

http://www.pegasusimaging.com/imagxpressse.htm

This web site aims to provind blind quality testing of sound codecs. The site is just being launched at this time (3/2002), and is currently testing eight codecs.

Update: As of 8/2002, a few new codecs were added to the test suite: Ogg Vorbis 1.0, MPEG-4 Audio for QuickTime, and the PsyTel MPEG-4 AAC codec.

http://www.soundexpert.info/

This is an open source PDF renderer, which includes code that decompresses LZW data embedded in the PDF file. It doesn’t actually do the LZW decompression itself - it converts the data to a format that can be handled by UNIX compress.

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

This Java browswer knows how to render PDF files, which means it understands the elusive LZW compressed data format used by Adobe.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~phelps/Multivalent/

A variety of libraries that can be used to read and write PDF format.

http://www.geocities.com/marcoschmidt.geo/java-document-libraries.html#pdf

The New York Times covers the Forgent JPEG case. A good overview of the case.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/technology/29JPEG.html

Forgent explains their position with respect to the infamous ‘672 patent.

http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=FORG&script=410&layout=-6&item_id=3
14044

An article on CNET regarding the Forgent JPEG patent. This article brings up the allegation that one of the patent authors sat on a JPEG committee.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-945686.html

The Register UK reports that the ISO may withdraw the JPEG image format standard if the Forgent ‘672 patent holds up.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/26339.html

ExtremeTech reports on the Forgent JPEG patent case.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,389261,00.asp