[OT] Best Compression program

[Hacker]

Compression is not the onle thing in compressors. You need also a good speed. If rar and 7z take much less time to do almost the same thing, why should I use this new unknow format.

It all depends on one's personal preferences.

Roman

[TW]

@JP

If rar and 7z take much less time to do almost the same thing

always depends what type of files you are compressing. keep in mind that none of the current archivers (wait for stuffit9) can really compress jpeg, also it's a bad idea to compress MSI installations, as they are compressed already with MSCAB. also other installations are already compressed, and no packer will achieve good result.
if i can see something is packed already, i always use .zip, which is by far the fastest of the well known packers.

get the testfiles @http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/files/index.html

[Lefteous]

I have compressed a complete TC installation package (w/o sfx) using WinRC --> 1.06 MB

[JP]

I'm not compressing .exe files. I'm compressing Word and Exel files. WinRK takes too much time and the result is not much better than 7z and rar. That's the point. I can't accept that it takes more than 1 hour to compress 100mb of Word and Exel files.

[JP]

Still looking for a better compressor than 7z, rar and uha. Any idea?

[JackFoo]

As other people said you'll have to balance between compression and speed, choose whichever is more important to you. WinRar is usually a good balanced packer even when configured at best comression (make sure you set memory size, dictionary size etc. to max) it's pretty fast. 7z can outdo WinRar when configured correctly however it's marginally slower about x2 slower when configured for good compression. So the choice is between these two, and it's your choice.

Note: To configure 7z correctly you'll have to use command line switches since IIRC you can't set these setting in the gui. The switches I'm using are:

For binaries:

Code: Select all

-mhcf -m0=BCJ2 -m1=LZMA:d8M:a2:mf=bt4b:fb128 -m2=LZMA:d4M:a2:mf=bt4b:fb128 -m3=LZMA:d4M:a2:mf=bt4b:fb128 -mb0:1 -mb0s1:2 -mb0s2:3

Plain text:

Code: Select all

-mhcf -m0=PPMd:mem300m:o32

Cheers.

[robinsiebler]

Are you sure that's a command line switch? It looks more like Perl to me.