.RAR

[Elledan]

Maybe you know about this format: .rar

It's the format used by WinRar, an other compression utility.

The three big compression programs:

WinZip
WinRar
WinAce

They use:

.zip
.rar & .zip
.ace (& .zip/rar?)

I've tried all three of them, and I WinZip left my PC as first, about a week later followed by WinAce.

Right now I'm only using WinRar and I don't want anything else. IMHO WinRar is superiour to WinZip: WinRar can decompress much more different files and the .rar is much better than the .zip format (better compression ratio, the possibility to add a recovery record, multimedia compression, etc.)

What is your favourite compression utility?

BTW WinRar is available at: http://www.download.com and the site is at http://www.rar.de

[Owen]

.rar is a very old compression scheme. .zip works better for most things. (I think .rar will compress english text much better.)

Aladdin StuffIt http://www.stuffit.com (.sit) is about 20% smaller than .zip and is a quite good format. Macs used to exclusively use it, but now it is making it's way to PC.

Owen

[Owen]

In case anyone cares, here's how .rar (I think it is .rar, but it may be something else) works:

It works by finding prhases and compressing them. For example, the phrase "The happy dog jumps over the happy cat and the dog." It would replace "the happy" with one character/phrase, dog with another, and so on. So it gets english very small, but has lesser effect on binaries.

It is extremely elegent, though.

Owen

[daniel_eastley]

couldn't you:

get a file then;
.zip it, then .ace it, then .rar it, then .sit it and it would be really small?

[Owen]

No. For the same reason there is no point in compressing MP3s: The file already so compacted, that there is little room for improvment. In fact, sometime file size will actually increase when archiving an archive.

Owen

[Aidan Bahta]

I like the built in Compressed folders feature of WindowsMe/Win98 + plus. It lets you open ZIP files (and maybe RAR, etc) just like a normal folder. You can create compressed folders too. You can't do most of the things WinZip lets you do (such as set the compression amount) but it is really handy. In Windows Me, you can read CAB files too.

I haven't used many compression utilities, but WinZIP is my favorite program.

[PeterW]

I use the ms cabinet files...
Use the compress.exe tool with the quantum compression.. and I think you'll find it is pretty good at actually compressing files even though it is pretty sloowww

[Hierophant]

Originally posted by abahta
In Windows Me, you can read CAB files too.

I have been doing this since Windows 95's first release. They had a powertoy called Cabview

[Aidan Bahta]

Originally posted by wluke

Originally posted by abahta
In Windows Me, you can read CAB files too.

I have been doing this since Windows 95's first release. They had a powertoy called Cabview

Oh yeah! How could I forget

Ahh...the memories

[wdmny]

I use WinRar, and only create Zip files for distribution to people who don't have WinRar. Rar format is actually better in my opinion, especially for distributing large files, because it can split the package into many different files, based on a volume size. You can also choose a dictionary size for compression over speed. If you use WinRar to make SFX files though, use ZIP compression, RAR compression in a SFX is really slow.

PS(I compressed a 3.421 mp3 file with rar compression down to 3.328, and 3.330 in zip. So, altough small, mp3 can be compressed.)

[Owen]

Well, of course you can compress anything. 2% is hardly worth the time and effort to compress. It's mostly the headers that can compress. With that ratio, you'd be able to fit 2 more songs on a CD - a large tradeoff for not being able to play them right off the CD.

I compressed a MP3 from 9.25 to 9.17 with WinZip so the amount is roughly the same for the longer MP3...

.zip isn't the most efficient format, but it works and everyone has it so that basically makes up for it.

Later,
Owen

[jumpthru]

Originally posted by Owen
In case anyone cares, here's how .rar (I think it is .rar, but it may be something else) works:

It works by finding prhases and compressing them. For example, the phrase "The happy dog jumps over the happy cat and the dog." It would replace "the happy" with one character/phrase, dog with another, and so on. So it gets english very small, but has lesser effect on binaries.

It is extremely elegent, though.

Owen

Could you reexplain this? Also does anyone know how other compression works? This is kinda interesting.

[jumpthru]

Originally posted by abahta
I like the built in Compressed folders feature of WindowsMe/Win98 + plus. It lets you open ZIP files (and maybe RAR, etc) just like a normal folder. You can create compressed folders too. You can't do most of the things WinZip lets you do (such as set the compression amount) but it is really handy. In Windows Me, you can read CAB files too.

I haven't used many compression utilities, but WinZIP is my favorite program.

I use winzip...but how do you use the compression features in WinME?

[Aidan Bahta]

Originally posted by jumpthru
I use winzip...but how do you use the compression features in WinME?

To make a new compressed folder, right click on the desktop, and choose New then choose "Compressed Folder". Now you have a folder that is really a .zip file, but you can treat it like an ordinnary folder. As long as Windows is the default reader for .ZIP files, you'll see .ZIPs as a folder with a zipper on them. Try uninstalling WinZIP if you don't see that already.

[Owen]

Edit: This is the .arc method.

The method I was talking about is called a "Huffman Code" (now I'm not sure about the relation to .rar)

I found a great site, but I really can't remember the site... Aha! Here it is!

https://grc.com/apft/hlz.htm <-- great description.

Anyway, here is more info than you probably want: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~dan/pubs/DC-Sec3.html or http://www.ics.uci.edu/~dan/pubs/DC-Sec5.html


Owen