What files zip best

dbnavan

Anyone know what filetypes give the compression ratio's.

Am trying to save H/D space.

28064212

Not movie/music/picture files anyway. After that it's a bit of guesswork. Compression isn't a great way to save space anyway

Ponster

Indeed. Zipping stuff to save file space probably isn't the easiest road to take.

Word/Excel/Txt files tend to like compression. Have you tried letting windows compress your hard drive ?

jor el

Text files compress really well. Exes can normally be compressed to a fair degree too. For the most part though, your hard disk is probably filled with already compressed files, such as jpg, divx/xvid, mp3, etc.

Buy a new disk is the best approach I think. Or archive all your music and vids to DVDs and delete them. I've just finished archiving about 150G recently, in triplicate. That's a lot of DVDs I can tell you.

Stephen

Plain text compresses extremely well. Anything that's already compressed (mp3, jpeg, divx etc) will get very little benefit from zipping.

^whitey^

Bmp

dbnavan

Thanks all, pretty much what I thought. I really need to get myself a dvd Writer or 2nd Hard Disk

mr_disc

Whats the story with your existing drive ?, is it partioned ?, if so u could move the paging file from the c: drive to d:... or u could actually merge the drives ......

Ruu_Old

I wouldnt advise disk compression using drivespace or any of that muck. Get yourself a second hd or cdrw as you mentioned.

Capt'n Midnight

^whitey^ wrote:

Bmp

does anyone know a utility to batch convert BMP's into BMP's in RLE format ?

Capt'n Midnight

Ruu wrote:

I wouldnt advise disk compression using drivespace or any of that muck. Get yourself a second hd or cdrw as you mentioned.

NTFS compression is fine though. Because it compresses each file separately unlike drivespace/doublespace/stacker that put all your eggs in one basket. Also NTFS compression won't compress files unless you save at least one sector/disk allocation unit. While it takes longer to save files to a compressed format it can actually be faster reading and then decompressing the smaller file than reading the larger one from disk. Of course you can't use NTFS to compress files where the content changes like SQL / exchange / other dB files.

TerrorFirmer

Whats that archiver program game groups use to release ripped games.....can't for the life of me remember the name but basically it unpacks as small a file as 180mb to a few gigs....

I just burn everything to DVD and delete from hard drive, dvds are so cheap these days its the best way. I prefer this over an external hard drive...

Ponster

HavoK wrote:

Whats that archiver program game groups use to release ripped games.....can't for the life of me remember the name but basically it unpacks as small a file as 180mb to a few gigs....

Winrar. But warez is released rared not because of the compression but 'cos it's in the rules

zuma

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

does anyone know a utility to batch convert BMP's into BMP's in RLE format ?

Not sure myself but for batch conversions I use ACDSee....tell me if it works out.

Capt'n Midnight

www.7zip.org is the best lossless compressor for most non-multimedia files.
the interface is not as slick as winzip & co but it's improving all the time and in solid mode on a folder of similar files it completele wipes winzip also it's totally free.

for multi media files apart from WAV's and a few OLD image formats you can't really use get losslesss compression. the only way would be to comvert them into lower quality files of the same version or re-encode them using a different program (some work bettter) or convert them to a better type - eg DIVX

Cabaal

I've always found word docs compress the best and I 2nd 7zip as the compressor of choice

a_ominous

As others have said, a new HDD might be the best option. Just bought a 320GB SATA2 HDD from Komplett for 105 euro. How much time would it take you to reorganise your HDD?

for free image editing, I like IrfanView. Can do batch editing and supports many different image formats. Can produce thumbnails, images with text (copyright, etc.)

As the others have said, images, video do not compress well as they are, generally, already compressed: JPEG and MPEG compression relies on the human eye not being able to detect certain artefacts in the image (lossy compression).

Text files get very good compression rates (>90%). Non-text documents like Word docs or spreadsheets compress well as they mostly are text with some formatting information. Executables also can compress well but some are 'self-exploding' executables, which decompress into a temporary folder. All of these have to be lossless compression as you need the decompressed file to be the same as original.

DemonOfTheFall

HavoK wrote:

Whats that archiver program game groups use to release ripped games.....can't for the life of me remember the name but basically it unpacks as small a file as 180mb to a few gigs....

I just burn everything to DVD and delete from hard drive, dvds are so cheap these days its the best way. I prefer this over an external hard drive...

UHARC or something like that I believe. The compression is absolutely gobsmackingly amazing. Be prepared to wait a ridiculous amount of time for compression/decompression though.

I can't believe that UHARC isn't used commercially, the compression really is unbelievable.

Mutant_Fruit

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

UHARC or something like that I believe. The compression is absolutely gobsmackingly amazing. Be prepared to wait a ridiculous amount of time for compression/decompression though.

I can't believe that UHARC isn't used commercially, the compression really is unbelievable.

http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/summary_sf.php

Not really that amazing. Its only a few % better than Winrar.

zuma

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

UHARC or something like that I believe. The compression is absolutely gobsmackingly amazing. Be prepared to wait a ridiculous amount of time for compression/decompression though.

I can't believe that UHARC isn't used commercially, the compression really is unbelievable.

Ive used UHARC on a couple of occasions for decompressing "certain" files and have been amazed at the compression it is capable of and also the horrendous amount of time it requires!

Though when Ive used it for my own files...the results have been similar to WinRaR!

TerrorFirmer

Ponster wrote:

Winrar. But warez is released rared not because of the compression but 'cos it's in the rules

Nah its not winrar.....the game is broken up in initial parts in rar format yeah but the overall thing unpacked isn't and uses something else....

edit: Yes, Uharc sounds familar

Ruu_Old

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

NTFS compression is fine though. Because it compresses each file separately unlike drivespace/doublespace/stacker that put all your eggs in one basket. Also NTFS compression won't compress files unless you save at least one sector/disk allocation unit. While it takes longer to save files to a compressed format it can actually be faster reading and then decompressing the smaller file than reading the larger one from disk. Of course you can't use NTFS to compress files where the content changes like SQL / exchange / other dB files.

Ah right, the days of me using drivespace are long gone. Last time was with Windows 3.1.

Capt'n Midnight

speed is also important with compression, some of those with the best compression ratios only do it because they try exhaustive combinations and lots of system resources and would be great if you producing something that many people would use like a download, but would be tedious on every file.

DemonOfTheFall

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/summary_sf.php

Not really that amazing. Its only a few % better than Winrar.

Fair enough, maybe there were other things going on in the UHARC compressed files that I was decompressing, but I've seen 180 megs of RARs balloon out to close to 2 gigs before, and we're talking about pictures, sound and video here.

Mutant_Fruit

They were more than likely lossy compressed. The sound was probably compressed to low quality MP3, then unpacked and restored to it's original format. That kinda thing. But generally speaking, games aren't that compressible at all, as they can contain a large proporition of already compressed materials.

subway

they rip them,
cut scenes are reduced in resolution,
talking is replaced by subtitles,
hi res modes aer removed.
soundtracks aer converted to mp3,
textures stored in low res.

actual rips like the above are non existent these days.
but a 2 gig game could easily go down to 2 or 300 megs if the above craic was followed

srr -
http://www.theisonews.com/forums/viewtopic.php%3Ft%3D116744%26sid%3D6f1737f0946a3f72ba7f495f7f5e154b&e=15235&ei=keOkRLjUD4y2wgGRlKCNCA