David Scott has written a bijective BWT transform, which brings all the advantages of bijectiveness to BWT based compressors. Among other things, making BWT more suitable for compression-before-encryption and also give (slightly) better compression.

Jarek Duda’s “Asymmetric Binary System” promises to be an alternate to arithmetic coding, having all the advantages, but being much simpler. Matt has coded a PAQ based compressor using ABS for back-end encoding. Update: Andrew Polar has written an alternate implementation of ABS.

So many of today’s files are already compressed (using old, outdated algorithms) that newer algorithms don’t even get a chance to touch them. Christian Schneider’s Precomp comes to rescue by undoing the harm.

There aren’t too many companies working on cutting edge codecs, and of those few this one is hiring. Best of luck.

Its old news that China has developed their own Advanced Video Standard to avoid high licensing fees. English translation of the standard is now available, along with the IPR policy. Finally something technical that you can get your hands on to feed your appetite.

If you are in any way interested in data compression, DCC is a place where you really want to be. Where else can you expect to meet so many people who can all get so excited about saving 5 more bytes. Submissions for DCC 2008 are due by November 12.

Jeff Gilchrist has released mpibzip2, a parallel implementation of the popular bzip2 block-sorting file compressor that uses MPI and achieves significant speedup on cluster machines.

A New Zealand based company, NearZero has nothing to show after more than 6 years and $5 million of investor money. Liquidators called in (Update 11th Nov 2007: Liquidation ordered).

After forgent’s JPEG patent claims, its Alcatel-Lucent’s claims on MP3. A US judge has approved a jury’s decision to award Alcatel-Lucent $1.52 billion after it ruled that Microsoft had infringed an audio technology patent.

HP’s Susie Wee gives some insight on newly approved Part-8 of Jpeg2000 standard which deals with, among other things, intelligent encryption of Jpeg 2000 files. Susie has been working on media security for scalable media for some years now, and is a co-editor of the JPSEC standard.