pouët.net

Why? Just.... Why? Why not zip?

Why not .lzx?

Why not .tar.bz2?

I think RAR is a proprietary format while ZIP is an open format. But I'm not sure.

Why rar? Because gives better compression than zip.
Why not .lzx? Too uncommon.
Why not .tar.bz2? Good compression, but takes longer to compress. Also, probably unknown to most non-*NIX people.

Better compression that zip? Show me. Actually don't bother because I don't care. Facilities to unpack .zip files come with Windows and most (all?) Linux distros, that's not true of rar. Conclusion: don't use rar.

When I know I'm talking with a computer noob (the population in general), I always compress my files in .zip.

BurgrLovr : nice one, DX/OpenGL, Linux/Windows, Atari/Amiga were getting boring :)

This one will probably keep pouet trolls busy the whole week-end \o/

Why not .7z ?

http://rlwpx.free.fr/WPFF/comploc.htm

btw burgrlovr: because the 'other' scene uses it.

I stick on rar for any audio stuff.

What pisses me off about rar is the fucking multiple files!!! Downloading them is a hassle, especially if you have to do one at a time, then it takes a while to depack, then sometimes 1 archive is damaged and so on.

Rar is fine with me, but just 1 file!!

then you have to download the damaged part, not the whole archive!

eh? zip can come in multiples not just rar. The way you say it Shane is that rar archives always comes split up. I guess you are talking about stuff posted to usenet, that's purely so that if some is uploading say 400mb, and it fails at 99% they don't have to upload the whole thing all over again, they can just upload the one part of the archive that failed.

But, back BurgrLovr asking to be shown for proof, you are right there is no need, as in 95% of cases rar easily compresses better than zip.

But hell here are a few links anyways.
http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/summary_mf.php
Maximum Compression

And if you wanna be picky on compressors and want the best ratio, then checkout PAQ and WinRK. They are damn slow but get awesome ratios(reducing an archive by ~80% as shown in the above link).

I personally use RAR 99% of the time, for stuff i'm sending out i'll normally use ZIP though because as you say most people will have the ability to decompress the file. For huge archive storage purposes i use SBC because it has good compression ratio and speed.

ZIP is old and sucky by comparision to todays modern compressors, it's about time people moved on as there are many many better compressors out there. LZX was of course stunning in it's day, but after ZIP RAR is prolly the next most common format.

If you're downloading from a website, use a plugin like DownThemAll for FF. Also gives you good speed by using just enough connections.

What I don't get though, why does anyone care about the marginal difference between zip and rar and any other compression tool? Zip is the best supported, so what does it matter if archives end up .1% bigger? I could understand it if rar were more robust (letting you salvage files from damaged archives etc.), but it's not.

More importantly, Amiga > Atari.

If you're compressing something huge and get a BIG difference in size by using rar then I can understand that, but for something like and c64 disk image, given that zip is most supported, why would you use anything else?

I like the interface for winrar better than winzip.

parapete: But mostly distributed archives are compressed files anyway. Like MSI and executable versions of the same thing (I assume they have embedded CAB files?), and videos, pictures, etc. It's all compressed to death already and there's really not much left for the archive packer to do. And who cares if it takes 54 or 55 minutes to download a large archive? Unpacking takes time too.

As for WinRAR and WinZIP I'd prefer not to use either. The nice thing about ZIP is that Windows has native support for it so you don't need a dedicated application unless you're doing something fancy. Dopus has nice ZIP support too, so ZIP archives are treated much like folders, as in Explorer.

I tried something the other day using WinRAR. When doing very high-res pictures in Photoshop the PSD files tend to take up 100-200 MB of disk space each. I'm also a big fan of incremental backups so I'll save nakedchick01.psd, then nakedchick02.psd etc., and before you know it, you've got 10 GB of data per picture that you'll probably never need but don't quite want to discard, just in case. Since the files would be very similar I figured if I put them all in an uncompressed RAR archive, then compress that archive, RAR should be able to save me a lot of disk space. Turns out that putting 4 GB of files in one archive with NO compression took more than an hour, and it's not cause I have a slow PC. I didn't bother with trying to pack the archive after that, cause it was quite clear it'd take me days to go through all my pictures this way. WinRAR is shit.

I remember switching from ZIP to RAR in my younger5days, when still having to use 1.44mb Disks, rar's superior compressing at that time would save a disk or so , Im not sure about the compression ratios noeday's but im pretty sure that's when/how RAR compression became popular.

On windows you use 7zip, it one program to rule them all(most). Also it's nice to use to make *.gz files of your d64-images since all empty space on the disks are reduced to almost nothing so you get a small or really small file instead of 174 848 byte. Also those files load up right away in VICE (perhaps zip-archives and shit do now to, I haven't bothered to check that). The downside is that there's no saving on those disks so I only use it for disks that I'm not going to alter.

next to no bbs's supported rar, so noone was using it. i still don't use it for scene purposes, i don't know if others do or not though (warezscene dont count - although they are actually using rar packed into zip!)

the dos version of rar already featured a gui and selfextraction. that was my reason to use it back in the days.