pouët.net

7Zip is pretty good, sometimes it'll give better compression than RAR, other times not as good as RAR. Depends on what you are compressing really.

One good thing about rar is that it's not usually recognized by automatic virus scanners.. so if you want to send an exe file as an attachment, you can rar it up and it won't be blocked.

It amuses me that in Japan they still use lha/lzh for nearly everything. When I started getting into Japanese games it was like going back to the Amiga days! :)

I disagree with the use of RAR simply because there is no free/open source compressor.
bz2 and 7z usually compress better in my experience, and are free.

But is this discussion really relevant? I can't remember the last time I had to download a scene release in .rar format.

Preacher: You can also use the clever trick of renaming the file. Which you'll probably be in the habit of doing anyway if you're using virus scanners that block email attachments for no good reason. Or Outlook which just won't let you send certain types of files.

nagato^ : http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=33069 This is the one that fueled my anger to start the topic ;) There are plenty of others out there too.

Warez/cracktros lamers usually use .rar
Demoscene lamers usually use .zip

That's the real difference :)

Yes, what type of data you are compressing is important. Isn't bzip2's claim that it compresses text better than gzip for instance?

Yer bzip is much better at text compression than gzip as it's based on the burrows-wheeler algo. But bzip still gets butchered to death by PAQ's text compression.

keops: ... and elites use UHARC!

Doom: Sure, unlesss you're sending more files in one go than just mynext64k.renamethistoexelol, at which point it just gets easier to rar it up.

i found pc stuff in lha archives on some japanese site

which is an indication to lha becoming popular again in five years in western community.

what about arj?

I think that the fact that I once typed "arj x watcom" is the single greatest reason I'm here now. So, big props to arj!

arj a -r -v1440000 ftw \o/

rar4evah <3

Should we lynx and c64-zip our PC-stuff perhaps?

ARJ sucks. I had a lot of my old stuff backed up in ARJ archives once and they went bad just as I needed the backups. I think just a few bits flipped, but at least at the time there were no tools to salvage files from damaged ARJ archives. I was slowly but surely figuring out how to make my own tool for that, but then the drive they were on suffered mechanical failure, and all was lost. Fuckings to archivers.