Oh any help how to get the maximum compression out winrar or a step by step guide would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
No, movies and music files are already compressed, so compressing them further won’t gain anything. In fact it will actually increase the file size because compressed files require some overhead. So even winrar won’t help, though it might be convenient to have one big file with everything in it (you can even break it up into multiple part files.)
Iso is a container format; it’s a 1:1 mapping to how the bits are stored on disk with a header at the start describing the structure. Bin/cue separates the header into a separate file and can include data structured in ways that don’t comply with the ISO-9660 standard.
WinRAR is a compression/decompression program. It supports multiple archive types and compression formats.
Depending on the type of data you are compressing and whether you want lossless or lossy compression, you’ll want to select a different compression algorithm.
Depending on how you plan to use the files, you’ll want to use a different archive format.
Assuming you use the rar archive format, you still have a lot of options to consider. Should the data be encrypted or not? Should the directory structure be encrypted or not? Do you want parity files and segmented archives, so that if one of the parts gets corrupted (or goes missing), you can still extract the original data in a lossless way?
Beyond all that and selecting the compression algorithm that best compresses the type of structured data you’re storing, the general rule is that if you’ve got lots of data, using the largest dictionary and the largest compression window you can will result in the best compression.
So the dictionary is essentially a code book that says “when I see data x, represent it with data y in the file”. The compression window is how much of your original data is loaded into memory at any given time for the dictionary to look at and compress.
[edit] if you’ve got video, the best compression format commonly available today is H.265. This is a lossy compression format, meaning you’ll never be able to precisely recreate the original file. But it’s close enough not to matter at the right compression settings.
And if you’re using H.265, the best container format to stick it in is an MPEG-4 archive (typically with a .mp4 extension).
The result is a highly compressed and structured file. Loading chunks into memory for rar compression will usually result in a larger file, because the data is already compressed in a structured manner that a general compression algorithm can’t match… meaning that you’d get the input of xxxxx resulting in output of yyyyyy.
As most have said, doubling up compression won’t usually get you much.
However, video compression is usually designed to facilitate performance of sequential reads because videos are typically played beginning to end, so theoretically there may be ways to compress them more if you’re willing to make sacrifices there.
I doubt RAR is the way to do it, though. It just hasn’t been designed for this kind of data.
Maybe there’s a video compression format out there designed specifically for archival storage, but I’m not aware of it.
ISO won’t get you any further compression, that’s for sure.
You could certainly test this out yourself and let us know if you get any space savings.
TV shows and movies are already compressed. If you try to compress something that’s already compressed, it typically ends up bigger if anything.
Have you tried compressing it again?
Why does it get bigger? I’ve wondered that for a while now.
I would think that compressing something that’s already compressed would still compress it further but at diminishing returns.
Once the files are added to the zip folder your also adding information about the files so they can be removed.
Ohhh you know that makes sense. So, basically, what you’re saying is this?
[Files] = [Files] [Compressed Archive] = [Files] + [Archive Metadata]There’s more to it than that. Firstly, at a theoretical level you dealing with the concepts of entropy and information density. A given file has a certain level of information in it. Compressing it is sort of like distilling the file down to its purest form. Once you reached that point, there’s nothing left to “boil away” without losing information.
Secondly, from a more practical point of view, compression algorithms are designed to work nicely with “normal” real world data. For example as a programmer you might notice that your data often contains repeated digits. So say you have this data: “11188885555555”. That’s easy to compress by describing the runs. There are three 1s, four 8s, and seven 5s. So we can compress it to this: “314875”. This is called “Run Length Encoding” and it just compressed our data by more than half!
But look what happens if we try to apply the same compression to our already compressed data. There are no repeated digits, there’s just one 3, then one 1, and so on: “131114181715”. It doubled the size of our data, almost back to the original size.
This is a contrived example but it illustrates the point. If you apply an algorithm to data that it wasn’t designed for, it will perform badly.
If you want to compress video files, you’ll need to reencode them. Maybe using something like HEVC (High Efficiency Video Codec). But for 80GB of videos, you’ll be there for a while and probably won’t shrink them enough to be worth it. It would likely take less time to simply re-download the files later, even with a mediocre internet connection. In practical terms, you won’t get that 80GB to be any smaller.
ISOs don’t compress anything, as far as I know, or at least not by default. I think they’re basically just a container.
To reencode your videos, you can use the free HandBrake.
Just buy another hard drive, damn.
80 gb is not a lot for movies. My average 4K movie is between 60 and 80 gb per movie. If you start encoding and compressing them you start seing compression artifacts and reduction in quality very quickly.
My advice: don’t compress movies if you can. Just get more storage. Storage is relatively cheap these days.
just throw away every second frame. repeat for more compression. at some point you ll be left with a couple of pictures to remember the story and replay it faithfully in your head.
you welcome !
Put the data inside a mini-blackhole and activate Future Gadget #8 PhoneWave (name subject to change)
If I use winrar to compress 80gb of tv and movies.
You haven’t gained anything by doing so since video is already compressed. Compressing data that is already compressed will usually make it slightly larger - or if you’re lucky maybe you’ll save like 1 megabyte space, not really anything worth the trouble.
Then can I compress it further by making it an iso?
ISO is not compression.
well you can’t compress anything by making it into an iso. Because iso does exactly zero compression whatsoever.
Well, it’s sort of possible to compress large things into small sizes. But I don’t think it would work for this situation.
There are things called “.zip bombs”. Where an otherwise small file, when unpacked, can take up a large amount of space.
A famous example of a zip bomb is titled 42.zip, which is a zip file of unknown authorship consisting of 42 kilobytes of compressed data, containing five layers of nested zip files in sets of 16, each bottom-layer archive containing a 4.3-gigabyte file for a total of 4.5 petabytes of uncompressed data.
Zip bombs wouldn’t apply here, from what I understand to create those you’d have to start with uncompressed data. The typical example is using a bunch of zeroes as the starting point, not only is that compressible but the compression algorithm will look for redundancies in the data to increase the compression efficiency (a bunch of zeroes would have tons of redundancy).
Stackoverflow has a good discussion on it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1459673/how-does-one-make-a-zip-bomb
