Quite a lot of work for an extra 5% ;)

'Lrzip uses an extended version of rzip which does a first pass long distance redundancy reduction. The lrzip modifications make it scale according to memory size. [...] The unique feature of lrzip is that it tries to make the most of the available ram in your system at all times for maximum benefit. It does this by default, choosing the largest sized window possible without running out of memory.'

'On a single core of a Core i7 processorin 64-bit mode, it compresses at about 250 MB/sec or more and decompresses atabout 500 MB/sec or more. (These numbers are for the slowest inputs in ourbenchmark suite; others are much faster.) In our tests, Snappy usuallyis faster than algorithms in the same class (e.g. LZO, LZF, FastLZ, QuickLZ,etc.) while achieving comparable compression ratios.'  Apache-licensed, from Google

Great comments -- the Burrows-Wheeler Transform is crazy stuff

A high-performance compressor optimized for binary data -- 'designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than a traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch via memcpy()' (via Bill de hOra)

incredible. Almost every single modern camera capable of recording video now requires that you obtain a license from MPEG-LA to use recorded footage for commercial purposes. These clauses are currently not enforced, but could be. Horrifying (via Tony Finch)

'A variable-length format for positive integers is defined where the high-order bit of each byte indicates whether more bytes remain to be read. The low-order seven bits are appended as increasingly more significant bits in the resulting integer value. Thus values from zero to 127 may be stored in a single byte, values from 128 to 16,383 may be stored in two bytes, and so on.' UTF8-ish compression, used in Avro

15% smaller than bzip, 30% smaller than gzip, and now shipped with Fedora and Ubuntu. uses LZMA2

'A parallel implementation of gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines', by Mark Adler, no less