Best compression method ?

Hello,

which compression program has the best method right now ?

RAR or 7z or what else ?

It's because I'd like to "zip" my Tabula Rasa installation and try to burn it on CD or DVD after that, rather than simple uninstalling.

Alrik

7z is pretty powerful.

I believe 7-zip is the most powerful general compression method.

However, from the OP I did not understand what exactly you are trying to accomplish.

7z gives very good compression, but it's slower than ordinary zip and requires a lot of memory. If you just want to "fit" everything to DVD, you just set split to DVD size (or CD size) and you'll get several files you can burn. The easiest way it just to get a USB-harddrive.

Swedish "History A" in highschool. European history in half a year. That's compression indeed.

I've compared both 7z and rar compression,7z was better not much though.

When I put together computers for friends/family I install 7-Zip. It's open source with no nag screens and works great.

Thanks. I'll try that.

@Zakhary: I want to try to archive my installation of Tabula Rasa, because it contains all patches.

I once checked some russian (I think) compression that in some cases would blow your mind away. I think they managed to fit a whole Office 2000 CD in one floppy disk or something. The downside being it takes like 10 hours to compress and expand lol. I tried it, and wasn't really worth it, too much time and my tests were not as good, still better than RAR but no way I'll wait 10 hours to expand a compressed file!

I'm not really sure which method it is.But most pirates manage to compress games to ridiculous sizes like from 7GB to 1GB.I've been to Russia once and I've seen a single DVD with every Hitman game,not sure how they did it but it was interesting.

Kostaz said:

I'm not really sure which method it is.But most pirates manage to compress games to ridiculous sizes like from 7GB to 1GB.I've been to Russia once and I've seen a single DVD with every Hitman game,not sure how they did it but it was interesting.

Click to expand...

That's usually ripping, not compression. The easiest gains are made with games released in multiple languages - kill a few and you're down half the space, usually, especially if there's lots of voice acting. After that it gets trickier, but it's common to see compressed audio/video - a big size gain for a tiny quality loss. Following that step, though, I don't know - it can be further done on a game by game basis, I suppose.

One solution is when a few games use the same engine - for example, I've seen the whole Heroes 3 series (Armageddon's Blade, Shadow of Death, all the Chronicles plus some fanmade expansions) on a single CD, which is easy because all the games reuse basicaly the same assets. I think there's a similar thing for Baldur's Gate and other Infinity engine games, so I suppose something like that could have been done with Hitman too (I think at least a few games share the engine). Still, it's a pretty good end result.