Best free file compression software in your opinion?

evo4ever86

evo4ever86

evo4ever86

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Hey all

I've been using 7-Zip for quite some time now and im wandering whether theres better/faster file compression software out there?

I've already used WinRAR and WinZIP so dont recommend these as I think 7-Zip is superior! What are your thoughts?
 
I use 7-Zip, but, on media files, does not gain a lot imhop
..I would be looking for multi-threaded/core apps, if I had some serious compression (hierarchical directories) to do, not sure 7-zip does that
 
I used WinZip back in Windows 3.1 day then soon later moved to WinRAR because I found it was faster than WinZip.

I few years ago I read about 7-Zip surpassed WinRAR in compression benchmarks then I installed 7-Zip to tested downloaded and uncompressed files and compared to WinRAR, I was impressed 7-Zip is faster so I uninstalled WinRAR and stick with 7-Zip. But a month later I downloaded and uncompressed files and drivers with 7-Zip and it threw up data error during files uncompressed, I thought files and drivers I downloaded was corrupted so I redownloaded it 5 times and it still threw up data error then tried downloaded older 7-Zip version but it still threw up data error. Hmmmm so I decided to downloaded and installed WinRAR and I very surprised to see the same files and drivers downloaded 5 times was uncompressed just fine with WinRAR which 7-Zip claimed it was corrupted. I realised 7-Zip is a garbage waste of time and uninstalled it.

I now stick with WinRAR, been used WinRAR for amazing 25 years now.

7-Zip is very unreliable.
 
AthlonXP1800 said:
I realised 7-Zip is a garbage waste of time and uninstalled it.
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so your downloaded file may have had some checksum problems, that winrar ignored/worked-around and 7-zip baulked on. .. one swallow .....


edit - checking winrar doc
1. Recovery Records

When you create a new archive using WinRAR, you can add so called recovery records to it. To do so, you simply check the "Add Recovery Record" box when the archive name and parameters dialog appears.
..
The recovery information increases the archives size by 3% by default. This means basically that you will be able to restore up to 3% of missing or damaged data by default.
Click to expand...




Rroff said:
though off the top of my head I think it still uses 2 threads heavily for a lot of stuff but potentially can use 16+.
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it seems unclear about true parallel encode capabilities https://superuser.com/questions/142021/7-zip-compression-on-multi-core-computers.
However, did see there appears to be a designated p(arallel)bzip2 programme too, I always use bzip2 in the unix world, and, had not realised you can get it for windows too
 
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jpaul said:
I use 7-Zip, but, on media files, does not gain a lot imhop
..I would be looking for multi-threaded/core apps, if I had some serious compression (hierarchical directories) to do, not sure 7-zip does that
Click to expand...

Lossless compression methods like 7zip will have no effect on media files because they have already been compressed in a lossy compression method, you need to convert the files to HEVC to reduce the size.
 
that's demonstrably not the case ... clearly they are already compressed, but zip compression technique could be more/less efficient on some media files

47517268231_d9c78c366c_o_d.jpg
 
Energize said:
Lossless compression methods like 7zip will have no effect on media files because they have already been compressed in a lossy compression method, you need to convert the files to HEVC to reduce the size.
Click to expand...

Depends a bit - some media will be encoded for low latency decoding, etc. and can benefit from more CPU/memory intensive compression routines used for packing files.

I think it was WinIMP that has an algorithm specifically for media files which while quite CPU hungry can get some quite impressive ratios on media already using efficient codecs.
 
7zip doesn't seem to have the options of unix bzip2 either, where you can get it to try harder, at the expense of more cpu time .. which we used to do when internet bandwidth was expensive.
 
lurkio said:
7z , from tests it compresses stuff extremely well
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.... compared against ?

bzip2, which i have not tried on windows says
bzip2 is a freely available, patent free, high-quality data compressor. It typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best available techniques (the PPM family of statistical compressors), whilst being around twice as fast at compression and six times faster at decompression. The code is organised as a library, with a programming interface. The bzip2 program itself is a client of the library. You can use the library in your own programs, to directly read and write .bz2 files, or even just to compress data in memory using the bzip2 algorithms.
Click to expand...
 
tried zip format on highest compression and winrar on highest compression setting, against 7z LZMA2 highest setting
maybe I should have tried 7z bzip2
 
just tried it out thanks for recommending bzip2
373,208,087 B076VP84PT.rar
325,318,642 B076VP84PT_bzip2.7z
326,001,107 B076VP84PT_LZMA2.7z
325,278,122 B076VP84PT_PPMd.7z
the above done using 7z
7z has ability to create bzip2 / LZMA2 / PPMd / zip archives
 
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