 <p>Based on comments from @kapep I realized what I needed is actually a compression library that will do this work for me.</p> <p>I stumbled across an <a href="http://code.google.com/p/calista/source/browse/trunk/AS3/src/calista/util/LZW.as?r=3" rel="nofollow">LZW compression class within a package called Calista</a> which works great.</p> <p>I did notice that the compression was really slow, which is understandable, but if there are any suggestions for something quicker I'm open to them.</p>