Compress files??

[Pehla]

i was wondering guys if any of u compres files before??i needed that few times when i wanted some games burned on dvd but they are some mb biger then dvd!! so do u know how to setup lets say 7zip to archive file to (for example)60%? i know i did i once before maybe i two years
but i cant remember how!! i compres 8 gb to 4gb!
now it seems what ever i do i get 99% compresion!that is nothing...

[micropage7]

using upx? to compress exe files
but you need to make it executable zip first then do upx

[Pehla]

i have never heard of it before
so i make selfextracting archive then pack it with upx?
i will give it i try.thnx for reply

[Millennium]

Compression depends on content. Things like MP3, MKV, JPEG etc and many game assets will not compress so you will see 99% original size as you describe. You can't just tell it how much smaller you want it!

UPX is a good idea for EXEs but don't know if you can expand again and it's a niche thing, EXEs are no more than 5-10% of the average game content I would say. Dunno about DLL compression, but it's a red herring really, it won't help.

You can use 7zip etc to span across volumes, so you can fit a (say) 10gb game across 2 dvds using 5gb volumes and spanning. Look into it. I forget the correct words

[RejZoR]

It all depends on the contents. Back in the early days of DVD games, they had plenty of space compared to CD's. So they left stuff uncompressed on the DVD itself. Compressing such ISO image would result in very high compression ratio. But these days, even DVD discs are becoming small and game companies are already using data compression to fit more data on the same DVD. And since you cannot compress already compressed data, you're seeing more and more of the 99% compresion ratio moments.

Good examples of such scenarios is when you want to compres uncompressed WAV file and a MP3 file. WAV is not compressed and you can decrease its size significantly. You might gain few kilobytes when trying to compress already compressed MP3. The same is with images. You can compress BMP images rather well but when compressing JPG images, you won't really gain anything as its already compressed.

There are few very specialized algorithms that may gain some more compression out of already compressed data, but the gains are usually very small and usually not worth the extra compression time needed to perform the compression itself. Plus you can only use them to compress very specific data files.

[lyndonguitar]

I use 7zip or Winrar for all my archiving needs.

1 super compression program that I know is the KGB archiver. but that's a long time ago, I dunno if its still good now

[Pehla]

thnx for reply guys..i was hoping some miracle software that cen do it but its just like i tought so!
the game that i get from 8 gb to 4gb was line age 2 and was downloaded from web site!im guesing the files was not cemopresed so i gained a lot !

[RejZoR]

There is a PAQ compressor but it takes ridiculously long compared to 7zip's LZMA2 and you maybe gain few megabytes at best even with the largest data sets. Thats why most prefer LZMA2. It gets very similar results at almost idiotic speeds. It churns out 12MB/s on my system and while this may seem small, PAQ usually does all the compressing at speeds below 1MB/s.

[animal007uk]

Not your if its used these days or if it will help but what about uharc compression?

[Drone]

Best compression is RAR. First split archive and then put that multiple archive pieces in one archive. Kinda "yo dawg so you can have archive inside archive". Even packs with jpg and mp3 files can get smaller in size. The only con is winrar isn't freeware but you can use sharweare version.

[RejZoR]

If you're compressing programs, 7zip beats everything easily. If multimedia files are also involved, RAR can sometimes take the lead due to multimedia compressors. But in nearly all the tests that i've done, 7zip is simply better and faster.

[Recus]

Download FreeARC and use precomp, srep, lzma for compression.