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50 posts
Recommended commercial/open source compressors by the specialists?
Sorry if we don't allow criticism about specific software brands, but for the science.

Referring to the Compression video with Jeff Roberts and Fabian Giesen (may I include the missing one, Charles!)


Whether a personal preference or real use case, what are their recommendations about popular compressors: 7zip, winrar, winZIP, tar, and so on.

Based on the above, which formats do you prefer when compressing: images, text, a mixture of both?

Sorry if I am breaking the rules, I wrote this at work :S.

Thank you



Mārtiņš Možeiko
2559 posts / 2 projects
Recommended commercial/open source compressors by the specialists?
For general purpose compressor to use on your files just use 7zip. It's good.
tar is not a compressor. Tar simply concatenates files.

As for using compression as a library, from open-source libraries simply take lz4 or zstd. lz4 if you want something super tiny and super fast, but a not the best compression. Or take zstd if you want good compression and performance - in most cases it will be better than zlib.
50 posts
Recommended commercial/open source compressors by the specialists?
Edited by itzjac on Reason: typo
At the office, we have had intense discussions whether 7zip or winrar is better compressor or not. I don't really have a concrete proof about which one is better in terms of speed and size: overall the smaller and faster a file can be produced the better.

I tend to use 7zip because the variety of formats it supports, mostly all the formats I've used in linux and windows.

Sorry for mentioning tar, I should have said at least tgz, which is tar combined with GZIP.
Mārtiņš Možeiko
2559 posts / 2 projects
Recommended commercial/open source compressors by the specialists?
Well 7zip and rar are more or less comparable in compression size and speed. zip will be worse in compression size, but it will be faster.
50 posts
Recommended commercial/open source compressors by the specialists?
mmozeiko
Well 7zip and rar are more or less comparable in compression size and speed. zip will be worse in compression size, but it will be faster.


BTW, what's the name of the google compressor it is mentioned? did I get it right it compresses zip files?
Is it a gitHUB project?
Mārtiņš Možeiko
2559 posts / 2 projects
Recommended commercial/open source compressors by the specialists?
Edited by Mārtiņš Možeiko on
https://github.com/google/zopfli or https://github.com/google/brotli ?
zopfli produces zlib compatible compressed data, but it compresses much much slower to achieve better compression.
brotli is oriented for text compression. It includes huge built-in dictionary that Google thinks is good for compression. Here it is in readable format: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f66f6206afe40bea1f06 (raw data is in Appendix A of brotli spec).

I'm pretty sure that zopfli will loose to zstd (in compression ratio and speed). And zstd will beat brotli compression and decompression speed, but will lose in compression ratio for smaller files (because of that built-in dictionary thing). But you can fine tune zstd to also have prebuilt dictionary fine tuned for your data. Then it will beat brotli in compression ratio.
70 posts
Professional programmer, working in the video games industry since 2012
Recommended commercial/open source compressors by the specialists?
Hello,

These days, for exploring or compressing/uncompressing files, I use pretty much only 7zip.

On a professional project, we used lzham for compressing most of our assets (LZMA-like compression ratio, but 8x times faster to uncompress, still slightly slower that zlib). We had a hard application-size limit on iOS, and a lot of assets.

On a personal project, I plan on trying LZ4.

I didn't know about zstd, it looks interesting :)