Mark Nelson’s magazine articles, including articles on LZW coding, arithmetic coding, Zlib, and JavaZip.

http://www.dogma.net/markn/articles/articles.htm

MPEG-4 is an ISO/IEC standard being developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group), the committee which also developed the Emmy Award winning standards known as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.
This document appears to be an overview of the standard as it existed in approximately 10/99

http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-4/mpeg-4.htm

DAKX is claiming a new method of lossless data compression that is fast and patented. It works on audio and video data. The method is called difference-adaptive compression. DAKX supplies a bit of source code that you can experiment with, and will be happy to license the technology to you or your company.

http://dakx.com/

What the title says.

http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/jpeg-faq/top.html

Home page for Jeff Vitter, prolific author of papers which frequently include data compression topics.

http://www.cs.duke.edu/~jsv

Julian Seward’s home page. Julian is the author of Bzip. This page appears to be slated for removal.

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/arch/people/j-seward/index.html

Alistair Moffat’s home page. Alistair is one of a cluster of antipodal data compression mavens, currently working in Melbourne, Australia. This page has a link to some copies of abstracts and papers.

http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~alistair/

The purpose of this applet is to help develop intuition about maximum entropy distributions. A central advantage of the maximum entropy framework is its ability to model overlapping events without increasing the number of parameters or fragmenting the training data. Using maximum entropy techniques, it is possible to model a probability distribution on 2n elements using only n free parameters.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ristad/java/overlap/

A page with a brief description of LZW compression by Dominik Szopa. This page includes a Java applet that helps show how LZW looks in action.

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/365/li/squeeze/LZW.html

The JPEG FAQ, as maintained by Tom Lane and the Independent JPEG group.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/

InterGIF is a freeware program for making animated GIFs. It claims to do a good job of optimization. I have feedback from one use who was quite happy with the results - a sample GIF created by GIMP was reduced from 2235 bytes to 1455. Not bad.

http://utter.chaos.org.uk/~pdh/software/intergif.htm

A database of Fractal resources.

http://spanky.triumf.ca/

A freeware MP3 Encoder. Not sure of its status, the author seems to be having some licensing problems.

http://www.euronet.nl/~soloh/mpegEnc/

A Netscape plug-in that lets you display MPEG files online. Avoid the hassle of requiring a complete download before you can start viewing the file.

http://shareware.netscape.com/computing/shareware/software_title.tmpl?p=PC&category_id=60&
subcategory_id=69&id=16548

Just what the title says. IDL appears to be a product from Kodak that is designed for programming tasks requiring data analysis and visualization. You can read the full pitch at the

Research Systems web site. It gets a little breathless at times, but I suppose that’s to be expected.

http://www.dfanning.com/tips/how_mpeg.html

A plugin for the Netscape browser that lets you listen to MPEG audio streams.

http://shareware.netscape.com/computing/shareware/software_title.tmpl?p=PC&category_id=60&
subcategory_id=63&id=15085

Ligos claims to have the world’s best MPEG-2 encoders. The products are part of the LSX-MPEG family. Take your pick and purchase directly from the web site.

http://www.ligos.com/

Sigma makes hardware MPEG decoders. You might need one of these if you’re designing a set-top box or a new PC video card.

http://www.sigmadesigns.com/

Optibase claims to be a leading supplier of MPEG content creation tools. Their Web site lists products such as MPEG ComMotion Pro and the The MPEG ComMotion UDP.

http://www.optibase.com/

Xing’s encoder creates both audio and video MPEG streams.

http://www.real.com/accessories/?prod=xingmpegencoder

mtv is an MPEG TV Player that runs under Linux and UNIX. Besides watching MPEG files from the Interneti, mtv also lets you play Video DVDs. Freeware and commercial versions are available.

http://www.mpegtv.com/download.html

MPEG encoders and decoders, authoring software, and libraries.

http://www.pixeltools.com/

A big batch of links related to MPEG and Digital Video.

http://www.erg.abdn.ac.uk/research/future-net/digital-video/index.html

MPEG test equipment. The test/measurement arm of HP was spun off into a new company called Agilent. They make test gear so you can check your MPEG compliance.

http://www.tm.agilent.com/classes/MasterServlet?view=productgroup_2&pgr-ItemID=1000000200&
language=eng&locale=US

AOL’s search page dedicated to the PNG format

http://search.aol.com/cat.adp?from=catsearch&id=112910

Greg Roelofs tells the story of PNG. If anyone should know, it would be the wise man known as Cave Newt.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/slashpng-1999.html

GSM provides telephone quality speech at a compressed rate of 13 Kbps. Compare this to the 64 KBps required by standard u-law and A-law codes. This site gives lots of info about the GSM format, along with free source code.

http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/toast.html

This company makes the AMBE-2000, a Vocoder chip that compresses speech down to a miniscule 4 Kbps. They have an additional product library of low bit-rate codes both in hardware and software.

http://www.dvsinc.com/

This site contains the comp.speech FAQ, and also has links to their ftp site, which contains software for speech codecs.

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/comp.speech/

This master’s thesis is available in PS format here. The abstract entry is in English, the Postscript document is in Spanish.

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~miguel/papers/msc-thesis.html