Chasing NOSSO

[nanoflooder]

I think most of you might know about a company called nosso (nosltd.com) that makes distributions for some well-known companies like Adobe.
Somehow it manages to achieve great compression level while still remaining quite fast and not that memory-guzzly.
Some time ago I've been trying to beat it, or at least keep up with it in terms of compression, and I, well, failed. My own SFX distribution, which included nz -cO and precomp, was 1 megabyte larger and it decompressed about 3 minutes.

I would like to ask you to try I think we can even call it a challenge - to make a self-extracting distribution, that extracts itself in, let's say, less than a minute (though the Nosso one takes about 20 seconds or so), and weighs less than Nosso's.

This is the original file: http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adob...r910_en_US.exe - 25,5 MB (26 739 584 bytes)
These are its contents: http://rapidshare.com/files/218799112/adrd91en.7z (direct download) - 32,8 MB (34 453 550 bytes)

I have been testing it some time ago, and the only thing that could beat it was CM Both in PAQ-like programs and in NanoZip. Also, if I remember correctly, WinRK's ROLZ3 was either better or painfully close to Nosso. But there were one or two issues with its quality

Overall, I hope this should be interesting I don't know if it's "legal" to use the administrative install of the .msi included, but I personally don't see anything wrong with it.

[Skymmer]

I heard about it. If I remember correctly, previously this technology called Fead Optimizer and the company name was Netop Systems.
First time I met it I was impressed. I suppose or they use some kind of recomposing at runtime and probably not lossless, or maybe something like Precomp technique or set of filters. By the way you can have a look at it. Just search your HDDs for nosso_air.exe file. It must be at:
\Documents and Settings\<your profile>\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Setup Files\AIR\
Well, maybe Reader 9.1 in your case.

[Vacon]

Hello everyone,

well I'm not an expert, but AFAIK there was another discussion about something like that in the old forum.
Maybe they use a kind of size-reduction by cutting of the same file in different parts of the archive? That way it has to be decompressed only once to memory and copied from there to all places it may be used. Of course this can only be true for files that are the same for all different platforms the redistributable-archive is made.
Kind of lossy though...

Best regards!

[nanoflooder]

No no, I guess you guys misunderstood me I read about Nosso, I've traversed all the stuff this sfx makes etc. etc., I just wanted to see if someone can make anything better than that Thus I have posted a link to the contents of it for not bothering searching for it in %localappdata%.

[Intrinsic]

We've had 2 or 3 threads on FEAD already ;p i guess another one couldn't hurt heh, it's impressive enough to warrant it.
But remember it's compression is tuned for each product, one decompressor for say Acrobat won't work for [insert app name]. I'm not sure some generic compressor could get the same speed/size results, maybe size wise, but not both.

[nanoflooder]

...hence why I have opened this topic To see if we (or some of us) can make the same (or even better) using nothing but generic compressors and, well, head & hands.

[Simon Berger]

First we should have a look how fast the progress is to make sure if it is a sort of lz77 based compression engine. Then it would be a more amazing result.

[Sportman]

I have been testing it some time ago, and the only thing that could beat it was CM Both in PAQ-like programs and in NanoZip. Also, if I remember correctly, WinRK's ROLZ3 was either better or painfully close to Nosso.

I added installer as tar file36:
http://www.metacompressor.com/uploads.aspx

nz -cc as archive came close 26,816,830 bytes

[nanoflooder]

First we should have a look how fast the progress is to make sure if it is a sort of lz77 based compression engine. Then it would be a more amazing result.

Well, since it uses about 110 MB RAM and takes ~20 seconds to unpack, it is certainly assymetric, hence either BWT or LZ... I personally don't think it is BWT because of little memory usage