Greetings.

In article , 
Harry Potter wrote:
> I'm looking for a general-purpose lossless 8-bit technique that's
> efficient and provides at least a 2:1 average compresssion ratio.

There's no such thing.  Compression algorithms cannot guarantee any minimum 
or average compression ratio on arbitrary data.

What sort of data are you really going to be compressing?  Your subject 
line uses the word "codec", which implies that you want to compress media 
rather than arbitrary data.  If this is the case then you'd be better off 
finding an algorithm which is optimized to the sort of media you are using.

Regards,
Tristan

-- 
   _
  _V.-o         Tristan Miller          ><  Space is limited
 / |`-'  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-    In a haiku, so it's hard
(7_\\    http://www.nothingisreal.com/  ><  To finish what you

--- MBSE BBS v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux-i386)