Specifications and more information

Blubox

• Blubox is an advanced compression and encryption software program for compressing digital photographs.  
• Blubox archives work in a similar way to Zip archives, however Blubox uses powerful image compression algorithms to compress over 60 image formats with amazing results.
• Blubox compresses your photos by up to 95% without sacrificing picture quality using the very latest image compression techniques.
• Blubox dramatically reduces the time taken to send photos by email and to upload to the Web. Send a whole album in the time it usually takes to email a couple of photos! more> 
   At the touch of a button you can extract your files back to their original format for use in other programs. 
• Blubox encrypts and protects your pictures using 256-bit AES encryption technology… just add a password when you create a new Blubox archive. 
• Unlike other compression tools, Blubox lets you view your pictures while they are still compressed and encrypted… no need to extract to view, print or edit 
• You can organise and store your photos inside Blubox archives saving disk space and protecting your private information from intruders. 
• You can print directly from within the Blubox program or extract and print using your favourite graphics program. 
• A free Blubox Viewer is available to download from the blubox website. Create and send Blubox archives to your friends and family and they will be able to open, view and extract your pictures.

Blubox Image Compression

Blubox uses the very latest image compression techniques to get even smaller file sizes while still maintaining incredible image quality. Blubox achieves compression/quality ratios way beyond what can be achieved with industry standard compression formats.

How does it work?
Blubox uses a set of user-configurable compression filters to encode your picture and non-picture files before storing them in a secure Blubox archive file (called a ‘Blubox’). Blubox detects the type of files being imported and chooses the optimum compression technique for each data type. The data is then optionally password encrypted where it remains compressed and secure until you need to export it back to it’s original format. Your pictures can be viewed and printed while still inside the Blubox archive by using the Blubox program or the free Blubox viewer.

Blubox determines if the imported file is an image file and uses image compression according to the settings supplied by the user. Non-image files are compressed using binary compression which is the same type of compression used by the popular Zip programs.

Image Compression
Different types of compression have been developed to exploit the unique properties of multimedia data. Two primary methods of compression for image data are DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and wavelet which can achieve more effective compression than is possible through the use of binary compression. Essentially, image compression takes advantage of that fact that an image can be altered to a certain extent and still convey the same information or meaning as the original image. The human eye only processes a proportion of the detail presented to it, therefore a ‘visually lossless’ representation of the original data can be produced at a fraction of the original size.

Blubox uses wavelet and DCT-based image compression techniques which operate by reducing closely grouped pixels of a similar colour to a set of pixels of the same exact colour. By repeating this throughout an image, long patterns are formed by new blocks of same coloured pixels, thereby making the image more suitable for compression. Image compression mechanisms are often configurable to control the point at which the algorithm determines if a group of pixels is similar enough to try to lump together into a single block. A very relaxed setting allows the compression to larger, more compressible blocks while stricter controls will tend to make smaller blocks. This compression technique requires that a certain amount of information will be discarded from the image. This is called ‘lossy compression’ because information is lost from the image during the compression process.

Binary Compression
By default, Blubox compresses file data using a binary compression algorithm provided by Xceed (http://www.xceed.com). This type of compression attempts to identify recurring patterns within the data and replace them with unique, shorter patterns. The compressed data contains a dictionary of the original patterns and the corresponding replacement patterns. Decompression is then a matter of simply undoing those replacements found in the dictionary.

Since compressed data is made up of a number of short, unique patterns, re-compressing the same data often produces a negligible to undesired effect. The main benefit of binary compression is that it can be applied to any type of data; However, some types of data generally compress better than others. Text and document files compress well due to that they typically contain highly redundant sequences of values (i.e. words and sentences). A shortcoming of binary compression is that multimedia data (images, videos, music) usually contains a wide range of the seemingly random values which negate the effects of this type of compression. A truly random set of values would not compress at all as there would be no patterns for the compression mechanism to replace.

Email using Blubox

Blubox provides comprehensive, easy-to-use support for compressing and e-mailing files and folders. Blubox attaches the Blubox archive to a new e-mail message using your default email program, ready for you to address and send.

You can quickly e-mail the current, open archive by choosing ‘Email…’ from the File menu or by clicking the Email icon. A default message is added to the email which provides a link for the recipient to download the free Blubox viewer in order for them to view the archive you have just sent