[fitsbits] Rice compression from the command line

On Wed 2006/07/12 12:23:53 MST, Rob Seaman wrote
in a message to:

5) Note that I have not talked about compression algorithms at all.
Has any progress been made on these issues in the last few years that
FITS could benefit from? The compression convention is intended to
support multiple algorithms, of course.

I now mostly use bzip2 (GPL, bzip.org), it usually outperforms gzip by
about 10% for binary data.

I have also recently started to use 7zip, an archiving compressor that
mostly seems to outperform bzip2. The unix GPL distro (p7zip.org) also
supports gzip and bzip2 and various archive formats.

wikipedia has excellent articles on all of these. It also mentions
PPM which is supposed to be the best, at least for text.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bzip2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7zip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_archiver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPM_compression_algorithm

Mark Calabretta
ATNF