While making a Xpress Huffman compressor (for the Windows 8 bootmgr) I did a lot of research on different Microsoft compression formats. I have summarized my findings in the table below. If you have anything to add to or correct in the table below please tell me!
I plan to release source code for LZNT1, LZX, Xpress (Lz), and Xpress Huffman compression and decompression. My goal is to have faster and/or better compressors than the Microsoft provided ones.
I created a custom library to extract compressed files from a WIM file that did not require the Microsoft WIM library. Using the Microsoft WIM Library, to extract a single file is actually quite an elaborate process. I predicted this would greatly speed up the start up and running of my Windows 7 Boot Updater program since I use that file whenever the animation is set to "Default".
My current method (in Alpha v9) is to:
For the last couple of days I have been playing with WIM compression. I wanted to be able to directly read a given file from a WIM, even if that WIM is embedded in a DLL resource (specifically the activity.bmp file in the WIM in bootres.dll). I predicted this would greatly speed up the start up and running of my Windows 7 Boot Updater program since I use that file whenever the animation is set to "Default", see an entry on that for more information about its success.
When you compress your data, you are essentially reducing the space of bits…
