Quark.exe (2006) Data Compressor

[JamesWasil]

I came across a data compressor called Quark from 2006, and when comparing the results for Quark to my own and other compressors, I was very impressed with the results. It handles a variety of different file types very well, and with higher settings it seems to do especially well with multimedia and other files that are already compressed with other methods. Does anyone know the form of entropy coding or other methods that are used for it?

I can't seem to find any source code for it anywhere, but am interested to see it if anyone might know more about it or have it available.

[Darek]

Did you see this thread?
https://encode.su/threads/2808-Highe...ll=1#post53713

[JamesWasil]

Yes, thank you Darek. That's actually where I first found it from, but haven't been able to find any more information other than that thread. Was there anything else you know of that I may have missed on it?

[Darek]

No, I have not. As Matt wrote on LTCB page it's closed source program:

"quark v0.95r beta is a free, closed source command line file compressor by Frederic Bautista, Mar. 10, 2006. It uses LZ. It is characterized by high compression and fast decompression. The -m1 option selects relative mode compression, which is normally best, but slowest. The -d25 option selects a dictionary size of 2²⁵ which is the largest that will run without thrashing with 1 GB RAM. The -l8 option selects the search depth. Higher values normally improve compression (up to -l13, default -l4), but -l8 was the highest practical value for reasonable compression speed (7.5 hours). Also, larger values were found to hurt compression on enwik5. Compression time increases approximately exponentially with the -l value. The compression speed with -l13 is 6,100,000 ns/byte."