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Now take a group of, say, 100 JPEGs, and compress them into a single archive. You’ll get no real compression. [..] But do that with a compression algorithm from the future, and you’ll get a much smaller file.

Really? I guess PAQ8PX, Winzip 14, Stuffit 14 and PackJPG must be from the future.

http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/jpg.php

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It's worth noting that those are content aware, lossless compression for single image files, not cross-file.

That said -- very cool -- I didn't know those existed!

PAQ8 is definitely futuristic, by which I mean that it is incredibly slow on my machine and uses a ton of RAM :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAQ#Comparison

I was sitting here with 4 physical cores and 8 logical ones, 6Gb of RAM with the priority of compressing 7Gb of data as small as possible, as soon as possible.

7-zip fastest got it down to ~1.4Gb in about 10 minutes. 7-zip extra got it down to ~745Mb in about 30 minutes.

Yet the only options it had were up to 2 cores and up to 250Mb RAM. If I could have traded more cores and RAM for more speed and compression. Hrm.

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