File Formats

Archive File Formats

An overview of the compression methods used

Compression Methods?

A decent effort made at the Comp.Compression FAQ by the 7-Zip Guy -

http://www.cd.sc.ehu.es/DOCS/mice/compression-faq/part1/faq-doc-2.html

However, here we will be more thorough and get into more of the programming end and into more specifics.

Some general Links -

http://www.geocities.com/marcoschmidt.geo/archive-file-formats.html
http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/formats/
Some innacuracies, but some rare info - http://www.atariarchives.org/cfn/12/02/0079.php
Programs, Some obscure ones - http://www.cknow.com/ckinfo/def_c/compressionformats.shtml
By the DataCompression.info Guy - http://www.corion.net/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi/display/FileFormats
C64 - http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~schepers/formats.html
Amiga - http://perso.club-internet.fr/lclevy/amiga/formats.html
http://sochi.net.ru/~maxime/compression.shtml

7 Z?

ARC

ARJ?

BZ?

BZ2?

CAB?

GZ?

GZIP. There's a couple of RFCs...

ICE?

There are a couple that have this extension -

ICEOWS?

Fully Proprietary. Windows Only. Iceows

RN? - I'd like to see this on other platforms and with support for .shk and .Z files

IMP?

Proprietary (extract-only). Link to UNIMP source

JAR

LHA?

http://homepage1.nifty.com/dangan/en/Content/Program/Java/jLHA/Notes/Notes.html

LZX?

Proprietary Amiga-Only Format. There's a unlzx.c floating around, with a windows port of it also...

PAK?

RAR?

Proprietary (?) (extract-only). Link to UNRAR source

SFX?

Bytes 1-3 - Jump intr.
First header is boostrap program

SHK?

Shrinkit archives (Apple IIGS). See http://www.nulib.com/library/ for info.

SIT?

Fully Proprietary, BUT somebody reverse engineered it :). See Mac Utils?, sit, and unsit on unix.

TAR?

Not compressed. More like a directory. There should be a tar stream in wxWidgets now or soon...

UU?

UUENCODE. Not technically compressed, but in practice is.

Some info: http://membrane.com/synapse/library/uuenc.html

Y?

Yabbawhap (link in Comp.Compression is bad): http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/sipbsrc/src/yabbawhap/

Z?

ZIP?

ZOO?

LZSS...

Multimedia (A/V) File Formats

A good resource is the Codec Research Institute (warning - FDL!!)
Audio Coding Wiki (not much there :/)
Some Apple tech notes on thier older, more obscure, file formats

AIF?

AIFF...

http://shoko.calarts.edu:16080/~tre/AIFFC/

AU?

SUN AU Files.

u-law or a-law
- Traditional Algorithms
- Table-based Algorithms

CDA?

Windows CD-Audio Format.
http://www.csdn.net/Dev/Format/sound/cda.htm

MP1?

MP2?

Public Domain Decoder Source - http://lhodor.home.ro/MPEG/

MP3?

Quantization, IMDCT, etc...

Some unsorted links -

IMDCT - Wikipedia

WAV?

WAV...
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/audio/multichaud.mspx#XSLTsection132121120120