It means that FAPEC doesn’t require any specific hardware, contrary to some specialized data compression electronics found in TVs, media players, or even satellites.
FAPEC is implemented in standard C and its requirements are very modest. It means that it can run in nearly any processor – even in real-time microcontrollers.
We provide an executable program (or Command-Line Interface, CLI), a graphical front-end for Windows (WinFAPEC), a dynamic library for experts and programmers, and even Python or Java wrappers.

FAPEC is a two-stage data compressor:
It is based on a first pre-processing stage, which is adapted to the type of data being compressed, followed by a second entropy coding stage, based on our patented technology, performing a fast statistical analysis to select the most efficient binary codes.
Other solutions simply try to perform an exhaustive search for repeated strings or values, which can be significantly slow. Or they are restricted to a specific type of data, thus not applicable to other types.
With this staged approach, FAPEC is able to efficiently handle a wide variety of data – all in a single, lightweight, fast and multi-platform software program.
In a nutshell, FAPEC integrates capabilities equivalent to Zip, JPEG, MP3 and MPEG4 (just to name a few) – all in a single, lightweight program.
You can either let FAPEC detect the most adequate pre-processing stage and options, or you can set it by yourself.

Users basically care about two indicators: ratio and speed.
In many solutions, there is often a balance between them: you can either compress better but slower, or compress worse but faster.
By applying the adequate algorithms to your specific data, FAPEC can break this restriction and achieve high compression ratios at high speeds.
What is even more important: by better adapting to your data, and depending on the case, FAPEC can achieve significantly higher ratios than other algorithms.

These are some of the data types where FAPEC excels:

• Binary files with time series, such as sensor measurements (temperature, pressure, brightness, energy flux, power…), either as integer or floating-point values
• Multi-dimensional data (binary values arranged in a table or matrix)
• Raw multi-band images, such as color pictures, and specially multispectral or hyperspectral imagery
• Raw multi-channel audio or radio-frequency data
• Log files, such as those generated by data processing systems
• Tabular text data, such as CSV files or text files with LIDAR or Point Cloud data
• Genomics data, such as FastQ and VCF files
• As an example of tailored professional stages, bathymetry and watercolumn data files generated from Kongsberg Maritime multibeam echosounders

For some of these cases (such as images), FAPEC offers a lossy option, allowing to slightly reduce the data quality to achieve higher ratios. The default option is a lossless operation.

It depends on the specific kind of data, and it can also vary with each file or data block.
In general, at least on the mentioned data types, FAPEC can outperform other solutions like Zip by 10-20%, and in some cases it can even double it.
Speed is also important: even in single-threaded mode, FAPEC typically compresses much faster than other solutions. In some cases, FAPEC can compress 10 times faster than other solutions. Decompression speed is also excellent, exceeding 1 GB/s in some cases.
If you want to know for sure how much can you get from FAPEC, you can simply test it by yourself!

• Chunk-based operation: if your compressed file gets corrupted, FAPEC will try to recover it, minimizing data loss.
• Multi-file: you can store over 8 million files or folders in a single FAPEC archive.
• Multi-thread: do you have a many-core processor? FAPEC can use up to 16 threads for a lightning speed.
• Encryption: AES-256 (requiring OpenSSL libraries) or our own implementation of the XXTEA algorithm.
• License-enforced privacy: you can generate FAPEC archives that can only be decompressed with your license.
• On-the-fly basic analytics: while compressing each file, FAPEC can generate a log file with the partial ratios obtained for each data chunk. Some stages generate additional statistics on the data contents. It offers a kind of digest of the data complexity, allowing to quickly detect some features in the data, for example.
• DAPCOM support: we will help you to achieve the best compression results on your data. We can also design and implement specific pre-processing stages for your case!

FAPEC is mostly implemented in ANSI C with some POSIX extensions.
You can run it on Linux, Mac OS and Windows; x86 (32 or 64 bits), ARM (32 or 64 bits) or Power PC; Little or Big Endian.
It is lightweight (less than 1MB), and you can run it on low-range computers with slow processors and small RAM. By selecting a small enough chunk size you can run it with less than 1MB of RAM.
FAPEC can actually run in almost any computer, from satellites to supercomputers.

You can use it from the command-line, as an executable program. You can invoke it on files or on streams (standard input/output).
WinFAPEC provides a graphical user interface for Microsoft Windows users.
fapyc is the Python wrapper, which can be installed with pip install fapyc.
It can also be invoked through its C API, invoking it on files or memory buffers. Thus, you can integrate FAPEC in your own software.
We also offer the Java API (through JNI), as well as the FAPEC integration in HDF5, NetCDF and FITS.