Data Compression

[prashanthpai]

this is a common question - which software offers highest compression ?. That depends on the file format that undergoes compression and also the type of compression that we wan't - lossy or lossless.

Many say it's KGB, 7-zip or UHARC.
But personally, I use the opensource 7-Zip. I am also impressed @ compression offered by the command-line UHARC which could compress the GTA-Vice City(ripped) 1.32 GB to 239 MB.

To clear all doubts about compression formats & to chose the best one & for detailed benchmarks, do visit:
http://www.maximumcompression.com/index.html
also:
http://molhanec.net/old/archivers.php
http://blackfox.wz.cz/benchmark/

There are so many old compression utilities that many of us haven't even heard of, yet they deliver high lossless data compression. So, popularity and GUI shouldn't come to the scene here.

Searching through the blog archives, I found these articles by Raymond on this:
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2006/05/02/best-archiver-even-better-than-7zip-and-uharc/
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2007/03/08/best-compression-software-powerarchiver-gets-a-major-update/
It's time we need one more article from Raymond on data compression utilities comparison :P

[Raymond]

Hmm, to me as long as I have PowerArchiver that is able to unpack nearly all archive files and ZIP up files, I am happy enough :D

But I do have something about data compression coming up.

[Michael Y]

I hope it's : "How to Run KGB on your 1.7ghz laptop"

[utkarsh30june]

I have KGB Archiver installed and it definitely claims to compress 1 GB to around 10 MB or so. I am not sure whether the claim is true or not. :rolleyes:

[prashanthpai]

Definitely it may compress - there's no doubt. But there WILL be data loss :) That's for sure.

[robisin]

I tried the maximum compression in KGB for a 330mb file. It used up all my 1 GB memory. The slightly lower compression used around 500mb memory and indicated a time of 8 hours to complete. Can't wait that long so I quit.

[brayden]

when i ran maximum compression on my 512 mb machine it said not enough memory. but as Michael Y said

I hope it's : "How to Run KGB on your 1.7ghz laptop"

Same here with my 1.7ghz pile of junk that sounds like it's going to explode.

[robisin]

Just tried out extreme compression in KGB Archiver on a 13 mb file. File reduced to 1.9 mb which works out to compression ratio of 14.6%. Memory required is 492 mb and the time taken is 17 minutes. An equal amount of time is taken to extract and decompress. Maybe the performance will be better on a higher memory computer of 2-4GB.

[brayden]

when we get a monitor for my brothers computer i will try to compress something with kgb because his computer has 2 gb of ram and a alright processor and almost no games with some adobe bloatwares running on it.

[dpt90]

i use a combination of IZARC, 7-ZIP & KGB archiver