Is there a compression algorithm that is faster than JPEG yet well supported? I know about jpeg2000 but from what I've heard it's not really that much faster.
Edit: for compressing.
Edit2: It should run on Linux 32 bit and ideally it should be in C or C++.
Jpeg encoding and decoding should be extremely fast. You'll have a hard time finding a faster algorithm. If it's slow, your problem is probably not the format but a bad implementation of the encoder. Try the encoder from libavcodec in the ffmpeg project.