Compression of Files

BZIP2 []

• BZIP2 is an open format; source codes (libbzip2) and applications are freely available (licence similar to BSD).
• The Burrows-Wheeler-Transformation (BWT) [] is used together with Huffman coding [] to compress data.
• BZIP2 is well suited to compress both single files and data streams.

GZIP []

• The GZIP format is specified in RFC 1951; source code and applications are available under GPL.
• The compression method Deflate [] (RFC 1951) is used.
• GZIP is well suited to compress both single files and data streams.

ZIP []

• Several data compression methods are defined for ZIP:
  e.g. Deflate [], Deflate64™ [], Reduced, Shrunk.
• ZIP files could contain more than one file each one compressed individually.
• The ZIP structure allows splitting of an archive file into several single files.
• ZIP is specified publically.

 <   ^   >