BZIP2

The data format BZIP2 was created for the compression of single or concatenated files. Structure and usage of BZIP2 are similar to the older GZIP format. BZIP2 was developed as alternative to GZIP and offers improved compression.

The central compression mechanism of BZIP2 is the Burrows Wheeler transformation (BWT) in connection with a following Huffman coding.

BZIP2 was developed considerably by Julian Seward, who also maintains the official website []. Both the basic application, and the fundamental library libbzip2 are available as freeware and open source (licence similar to BSD).

As far as known, BZIP2 is not subject of legal restrictions due to existing patents. Originally used algorithms (arithmetic coding) were removed to permit a patent-free distribution.

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Burrows-Wheeler-Transformation (BWT) []

Huffman Coding []

Adaptive Huffman Coding []

External Links:

BinaryEssence is not responsible
for contents of external websites:

BZIP2, LIBBZIP2 (at Red Hat Sourceware) []

gzip.org []