WinRar versus WinZip - or really rar versus zip

[Kinesis]

Could some one please explain to me why some many files theses days are being compressed into a RAR file(s) and not ZIP? Is there some advantage? Less corruption maybe? Is WinRar better for compression than Winzip?

Just curious.

 

[NicColt]

for 1 it (3.0 or later) uses 128 bit AES encryption if you password protect them.
for 2 it's very easy to chunk your files into multiple parts which is very usefull to post online or 700MB chunks for cd's for example.
it's small fast and responsive, zip has gotten fat and sluggish.

just my opinion.

 

[Sid59]

because winRAR sounds menacing. winzip is sounds crappy.

 

[glugglug]

1) RAR files are far tighter compression than ZIP. Typically a ZIP archive decompressed and recompressed as RAR will be about 10-15% smaller. For some filetypes such as word documents and excel spreadsheets, the RAR version is often less than half the size

2) Solid compression lets you further this gap.

3) Recovery blocks in whatever quantity you want so that the archive has redundancy within it in case some disk blocks go bad or a downloaded segmented archive is missing/corrupted. (Although SmartPAR is really better for this).

4) Special non-lossy multimedia compression algorithms can be applied to bitmaps, audio and text (although text isn't really multimedia....) Sometimes the multimedia compression gets a better ratio than JPEG with ZERO QUALITY LOSS (unlike JPEG).

5) WinRAR has a superior interface

6) Handles ZIP files faster than WinZIP does.


Seriously, the only reasons ZIP is still around are:

1) Built into Windows XP
2) Better marketing to software companies with tools to have executable files run while they are ZIP compressed internally.
3) Better multi-platform support (StuffIt RAR plugin on mac doesn't support full featureset and won't decompress any archives with special options like solid archiving turned on).

 

[sciencewhiz]

bz2

 

[Kinesis]

Thanks folks. I think that clears that up!


Nice remarks Sid59 ...

 

[Sid59]

Originally posted by: Kinesis
Thanks folks. I think that clears that up!


Nice remarks Sid59 ...

anytime.