Lempel–Ziv–Oberhumer

Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) is a lossless data compression algorithm that is focused on decompression speed.

Design

The LZO library implements a number of algorithms with the following characteristics:

LZO supports overlapping compression and in-place decompression. It is a block compression algorithm—it compresses and decompresses a block of data. Block size must be the same for compression and decompression. LZO compresses a block of data into matches (a sliding dictionary) and runs of non-matching literals to produce good results on highly redundant data and deals acceptably with non-compressible data, only expanding uncompressible data by a maximum of 1/64th of the original size when measured over a block size of at least 1kB.

Implementations

A free software tool which implements it is lzop. The original library was written in ANSI C, and it has been made available under the GNU General Public License. Versions of LZO are available for the Perl, Python and Java languages. The copyright for the code is owned by Markus F. X. J. Oberhumer. It was originally published in 1996. Various LZO implementations are reported to work under Win32, AIX, ConvexOS, IRIX, Mac OS, Palm OS, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Wii, Solaris, SunOS, TOS (Atari ST), Linux and VxWorks.

External links