[00:31:12] <stickie> by the way, thanks for the sig sixofour
[00:31:23] <sixofour> dejavu
[00:31:25] <sixofour> what sig?
[00:31:55] <stickie> you will just have to find out *insert mystical music*
I don't think so, given that many competing products, both commercial and open source, support it. The most common compression method for zip files is the so-called deflate algorithm, which is completely patent and IP free.
The same cannot be said from the rar format, which is proprietary and bound to license fees.
You actually pays for a license?
Are you not using .rar on thart little tidbit alone?
[00:31:12] <stickie> by the way, thanks for the sig sixofour
[00:31:23] <sixofour> dejavu
[00:31:25] <sixofour> what sig?
[00:31:55] <stickie> you will just have to find out *insert mystical music*
That's not the point.
The point is that there are no free software RAR compressors. It's an industrial secret. Your data is held ransom by a company.
That's what proprietary means.
I know what it means, but I also don't believe "just because its not open" is a reason to avoid using something supriour.
In this case, being non-free doesn't help or damage us.
[00:31:12] <stickie> by the way, thanks for the sig sixofour
[00:31:23] <sixofour> dejavu
[00:31:25] <sixofour> what sig?
[00:31:55] <stickie> you will just have to find out *insert mystical music*
I know what it means, but I also don't believe "just because its not open" is a reason to avoid using something supriour.
It is when it means that to open the file you need to install some proprietary software because your OS cannot support it out-of-the-box. And if the proprietary software doesn't happen to be available for your OS, you are screwed.
Besides, rar is certainly not superior, especially not to 7zip.
RAR is actually faster than 7zip at comparable compression settings. 7zip's heaviest-compression settings are pretty much never worth it speed-wise.
But most prominently of all, RAR has a far better GUI. It's almost inexcusable to not have anything at least on par with it.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
[00:31:12] <stickie> by the way, thanks for the sig sixofour
[00:31:23] <sixofour> dejavu
[00:31:25] <sixofour> what sig?
[00:31:55] <stickie> you will just have to find out *insert mystical music*
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
ShinyDoofy wrote:
Nach wrote:
That's why we now need to use self extracting 7-Zip files. So Windows users can extract them without needing any programs, and be horribly mortified and scared by the .exe, and UNIX users can just use 7za to extract self extracting 7-Zip exe files.
Thank God I can spot irony every once in a while. A little part (possibly even a big one) died inside of me when reading this. While I already can't stand having win32 emulators, this is just too much sucking up to M$.
Can you spot sarcasm too?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
But most prominently of all, RAR has a far better GUI.
RAR is a file format. File formats don't have graphical user interfaces. They are specifications. I think you are confusing it with a program called winrar. We are talking about the file formats, not the software used to open/create them.
Rather ironically, winrar might have a "better GUI"... if you are running Windows. Guess how much better the "GUI" is in Linux. Which is kind of one of the main points here.
[00:31:12] <stickie> by the way, thanks for the sig sixofour
[00:31:23] <sixofour> dejavu
[00:31:25] <sixofour> what sig?
[00:31:55] <stickie> you will just have to find out *insert mystical music*
That's not the point.
The point is that there are no free software RAR compressors. It's an industrial secret. Your data is held ransom by a company.
That's what proprietary means.
I should mention that Alexander and Eugene Roshal (RAR means Roshal ARchive) are a bit more generous than the worst-case scenario, like they allow WinRAR to be used by individuals (as opposed to corporations, governments, or nonprofits) for free as fully-functional, non-time-limited trialware, and for Windows you even get a GUI, and there actually is a free-software RAR de-compressor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrar
The free and open-source Unrar is not as feature rich as the license-encumbered UnRAR being offered by the Roshals' RARLAB, but even though you get to use or distribute UnRAR for free and can even access the source code, you are not free to do modify the source code, so it is not free.
I think the ultimate worry is what happens when the Roshals stop being so nice, charge people in order to use WinRAR, and close up the UnRAR tool and make proprietary extensions to RAR so the old free tools don't work with newer RAR files? RARLAB is perfectly within its rights to do that, and the developers of the free Unrar would only be able to get around that by clean-room reverse-engineering the new format and defending in court that they did not look at any Roshal source code, which is apparently so hard to do that they didn't even reverse-engineer the current RAR3 format!
In conclusion: Relying on an automated process like NesVideoAgent to open RARs is a bad idea because of the potential for vendor lock-in.
Also, because the command-line versions of RAR for non-Windows systems are not free, I don't believe they can legally be operated from open-source frontends (unlike typical GNU command-line utilities for which free GUI frontends exist, like gparted for parted or gmplayer for mplayer).
Since when are movie files so large that we have to be concerned about using a higher compression application? I'm pretty certain that .zip is being used because the tools to unzip are widely available to just about every operating system.
Joined: 11/30/2008
Posts: 650
Location: a little city in the middle of nowhere
I would probably guess that a 7z compressed avi or mkv would not be much smaller than the original file. But for the purposes of downloading, because Bittorrent has shit bandwidth, I think it would be a service to further compress any video files, by any amount no matter how small. As far as input files are concerned, they're small enough already, and I don't really notice the difference between a 5kb and a 4kb file.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
RAR generally performs best in comparison to other archives when compressing a media file.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
I think the ultimate worry is what happens when the Roshals stop being so nice, charge people in order to use WinRAR, and close up the UnRAR tool and make proprietary extensions to RAR so the old free tools don't work with newer RAR files? RARLAB is perfectly within its rights to do that, and the developers of the free Unrar would only be able to get around that by clean-room reverse-engineering the new format and defending in court that they did not look at any Roshal source code, which is apparently so hard to do that they didn't even reverse-engineer the current RAR3 format!
I'm certain it won't be the case, for one simple reason: every single proprietary compression algorithm which didn't have a freely available decompressor was a huge commercial flop, and the Roshals understand that perfectly. They wouldn't want to shrink their userbase further when they already have hard time competing with free zip and 7zip tools. It's just not worth it.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
What is .Rar competeing with?
Only fringe users use .zip or 7zip. The small minority who give a shit. When it comes to big companies, I am fairly certain they don't use zip 7zip or rar, and when it comes to basic users, ive hardly seen a zip in the past 20 years. Its pretty much deprecated. And a few groups in the open source community have anattachment to 7zip for some dumb reason.
.Rar is like Toyota, they don't compete with anything, they are already on top, anything else is just a gesture by other auto companies.
[00:31:12] <stickie> by the way, thanks for the sig sixofour
[00:31:23] <sixofour> dejavu
[00:31:25] <sixofour> what sig?
[00:31:55] <stickie> you will just have to find out *insert mystical music*
Ive not said an erroneous statement since I have been here.
Broad, sure, but your supposed to be intelligent enough to know that and take it as is. Not that broad statements are negative anyways. But its a good scapegoat for people to write off someone elses statement without actually having to confront it.
Of course, trends still point to what I have said. So I don't know what statements of mine you are refering to, but it certainly isn't my assesment of archive format usage.
[00:31:12] <stickie> by the way, thanks for the sig sixofour
[00:31:23] <sixofour> dejavu
[00:31:25] <sixofour> what sig?
[00:31:55] <stickie> you will just have to find out *insert mystical music*
The real problem in this topic, is nobody made the "good" test
Warp made already the compare with something "common" and demonstrate its not realy needed
Now, the real good test (extreme test at least...) is with desert bus... here the outcome:
-Movie : 633'605 Ko
-Zip on site : 2'867 Ko
Now my tests:
-7zip set to maximum : 90 Ko
-7zip set to normal : 1'389 Ko
-Zip set to maximum : 2'867 Ko
-Zip set to normal : 6'764 Ko
-Rar set to maximum : 2'559 Ko
-Rar set to normal : 2'367 Ko (OhO)
Note: i didnt took the hassle to check dictionnary used ect.. probably can chunk more... i just used the preset "Compression Level"
Obviously maximum setting ask lot of cpu ressources (2min on my phenom), and ultra setting didnt saved anything
Also, winrar was used to make the zip, btw, size is never the same with rar archive twice in a row :/
Ah and yeah its all in ko.. doesnt matter ... but for the record 8 byte = 1 octect
Anyway, toyota win!
Now my tests:
-7zip set to maximum : 90 Ko
-7zip set to normal : 1'389 Ko
-Zip set to maximum : 2'867 Ko
-Zip set to normal : 6'764 Ko
-Rar set to maximum : 2'559 Ko
-Rar set to normal : 2'367 Ko (OhO)
Note: i didnt took the hassle to check dictionnary used ect.. probably can chunk more... i just used the preset "Compression Level"
Actually, dictionary size is the thing at fault here. RAR's is capped at 4096 KB, preventing it from compressing the original movie, well, optimally. Now if you compress the submission zip, the resulting archive will be a little more than 5 KB in size. It should only matter for repeated character strings longer than 4096 KB; i.e., Desert Bus is a "killer sample" in this case.
arukAdo wrote:
Also, winrar was used to make the zip, btw, size is never the same with rar archive twice in a row :/
Shouldn't happen at identical settings.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Could they all use the same one then? And redo the tests with that.
[00:31:12] <stickie> by the way, thanks for the sig sixofour
[00:31:23] <sixofour> dejavu
[00:31:25] <sixofour> what sig?
[00:31:55] <stickie> you will just have to find out *insert mystical music*
