WinRAR vs. WinZip (.rar vs. .zip)

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beowulf7

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I conducted a highly unscientific experiment. It's only 1 sample, but it's interesting nonetheless.

I compressed two files. One is 109,369,344 B (.mp3) and the other is 1,230 B (.txt). Add them up and you get 109,370,574 B.

I used WinRAR 3.50 to make a .rar file. It took about 2 minutes to do and the final size is 109,342,218 B. The .mp3 went from 109,369,344 to 109,341,368. The .txt went from 1,230 to 695. I guess the rest of the file size is overhead.

I then used WinZip 9.0 SR-1 to make a .zip file. It took about 20 sec. to do and the final size is 109,147,612 B. The .mp3 went from 109,369,344 to 109,146,688. The .txt went from 1,230 to 662. I guess the rest of the file size is overhead.

So the .zip file is much faster and is even slightly more efficient from this one experiment I conducted. I thought .rar was supposed to be superior, at least for compression. What are your thoughts?

Edit: I used an optimized compression setting for WinZip but not for WinRAR. So after tweaking WinRAR's compression to "Best", I observed the following results.

t took about 2 min. 10 sec., to do and the final size is 109,331,174 B. The .mp3 went from 109,369,344 to 109,330,414. The .txt went from 1,230 to 605. I guess the rest of the file size is overhead.

But WinRAR, while slightly more efficient in compression, takes much longer to compress.
 
i think that rar is better for bigger files at higher compression settings. try compressing it using "high" compression and see which one is smaller

i just did the same kind of test with a mp3 file using all the formats my zip program supported, here are the results. all of them are on ultra setting. 7z seems to give the smallest file size

compression.JPG
 
compslckr said:
i think that rar is better for bigger files at higher compression settings. try compressing it using "high" compression and see which one is smaller
Click to expand...
Oops, good point. I forgot to mention the compression I used.

With WinZip, I used "Maximum (portable)". With WinRAR, I used the default "Normal". I just reran the experiment for WinRAR and set the compression method to "Best".

It took about 2 min. 10 sec., to do and the final size is 109,331,174 B. The .mp3 went from 109,369,344 to 109,330,414. The .txt went from 1,230 to 605. I guess the rest of the file size is overhead.

So the compression now is a little better than what WinZip gives. However, it takes much longer to compress via WinRAR than it does via WinRAR. We're talking 20 sec. vs. 130 sec. :eek:
 
i am going to try with a 700mb video file and see what kind of results i can get
 
compslckr said:
i am going to try with a 700mb video file and see what kind of results i can get
Click to expand...
I look forward to your results! Also note how long it took to actually compress the file via WinRAR and WinZip. :cool:
 
Forget Winrar or Winzip for compression UNLESS you want to share a file with multiple persons. Then stick with Winrar. If your going for compression try WinUHA . Just remember file types when your compressing. Dont expect extreme compression on .exe,.mp3's and such, basically anything thats already in a compressed state.

EDIT**

Just so theres no surprises..lol..WinUHA is alot slower and will eat memory. But IMO is the best compression without a doubt.
 
.mp3 files are already largely compressed. Same with most popular movie formats. And depending on the compression type used, compressing your already-compressed files will do very little at best, and even make the archive file bigger at worst.

Really, there is no advantage to be seen from archive-compressing a movie, a MP3 or a photo for that matter.

To me, what makes ZIPping or RARing files handy is if you want to take several files - an entire album for instance - and make an easily managed single file for transfer. At the other end you will still have to extract the files to use them, but it makes it much simpler to download one file (the .rar) rather than several.

 
Compression like RAR and ZIP don't work too well on already compressed media formats like images, audio, and video as DevilDoc has said.

ZIP is decent, but there are much better compressors out there. I typically use bzip2 (based on Burrows Wheeler Transform algorithm) with high compression, but it's also more CPU intensive than something like zip or gzip (fast LZW algorithm based) generally. There's also highly specialized compressors like rzip, which has a 900 MB lookahead, but it also requires a lot of RAM while compressing. Perhaps it's even better than WinHUA. ;)

RAR itself can compress pretty well, but I have no clue what algorithm they're using in there since it's proprietary. It could be a specialized PPM (partial pattern matching) algorithm for all I know.
 
RAR doesn't always compress better, but in my experience it is technically superior with options, capabilities and safeguards.

And for what it's worth, mp3's (like most media/pics) are already compressed, so it's really kind of pointless for a single one. Try compressing a entire album or multiple files and see what happens. Text is the other end of the spectrum, it is usually fairly redundent information wise, has spaces, returns, etc, just a lot of fluff that is squashed with compression.
 
here is what i got with my 700mb movie file trial. maybe next it will be an iso image or something similar.


compressionvideo.GIF



screenshotcompressed.GIF
 
Doesn't RAR leave an option to repair itself where winzip does not?
 
I should mention why I compressed the MP3 file. I did so b/c I create mixes. I normally distribute them as .mp3. However, I was submitting my mix to a site that plays such mixes on a rotational basis. I have to submit the files via an anonymous FTP server that only allows uploads but no downloads. The owner of that server said that he only accepts .zip and .rar files. Furthermore, he wanted a .txt file that briefly described the mix. Therefore, I had to compress my MP3 along w/ the text file and create a .zip or .rar file.

So for the heck of it, I got curious and wanted to see if WinRAR was so much better than WinZip that most techies make it out to be. While compression was similar, the discrepancy in time it took to execute their respective algorithms (I have a stock AMD 3200+ Venice w/ 2 GB RAM, FWIW) was astonishing.

I've also read that .rar files are less likely to become corrupt than .zip files, but there's no easy quantifiable way to support or rebuke that claim like there is for actual file size and execution time.
 
compslckr said:
here is what i got with my 700mb movie file trial. maybe next it will be an iso image or something similar.


compressionvideo.GIF



screenshotcompressed.GIF
Click to expand...
Thanks for running the experiment. The big discrepancy in execution time (favoring WinZip) does not surprise me. But what does is that WinRAR could not outperform WinZip. Granted, the video file is already fairly compressed. BTW, did you keep the default compression settings or set them both to "best" or "maximum"?

The next experiment I'm curious to do (if I get around to running it) is to take several compressable files, such as text files and random Microsoft Office documents, and compress them via WinRAR and WinZip. That might yield additional clues.
 
those were both set to the highest compression setting with their respective program. i am going to try on some other file types tomorrow, this is kind of interisting. i am curious what will happen when i try an iso image and untouched dvd vob files. i will post more later. all the times are on my system in my sig
 
compslckr said:
those were both set to the highest compression setting with their respective program. i am going to try on some other file types tomorrow, this is kind of interisting. i am curious what will happen when i try an iso image and untouched dvd vob files. i will post more later. all the times are on my system in my sig
Click to expand...
Cool, see how those other files go. I'll do the same when I get a chance.

On a related note, someone informed me of these compression benchmarks. That's a lot of data! :eek:
 
After upgrading our Build process at work, we switched from zip to rar for compressing the build output (mostly dll's and exe's). These files typically compress rather well. While I don't remember the exact numbers, rar was around 15-20% smaller than zip.
 
compslckr said:
those were both set to the highest compression setting with their respective program. i am going to try on some other file types tomorrow, this is kind of interisting. i am curious what will happen when i try an iso image and untouched dvd vob files. i will post more later. all the times are on my system in my sig
Click to expand...

Well, you'd almost be better off setting it to no compression (or store) for mp3s and xvids etc - you're getting at most 1% compression because they're already packed.

The iso might compress well (some do, some don't) but the vob won't compress very much (it's already compressed.)

Just out of interest, did you create both the zip and rar archive on the same drive, or different ones?

 
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