Temporary compression?

[justinrye]

Instead of a permanent re-encode, how good is temp compression compared? Winrar for example (or better alternatives?)

[Baldrick]

Try compress a movie with winrar or 7z....and you will see that you can't shrink them much at all. So you must do permanent reencode to reduce the file size.

[jagabo]

The last step of most high compression codecs is very similar to the compression used in archiving software. So ZIP or RAR archiving will not give you much additional compression (the container overhead may compress a little, but that's typically less than one percent of the file).

[justinrye]

Yeah, I just tried it with winrar "best" compression, took nearly a gb off a 23gb file but that's all, not worth the 3 hour processing time.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

[lordsmurf]

I get stuff like this a lot...

Client: Email it to me.
Me: It's too large to email.
Client: Can't you just zip it?
Me: <Sigh...>

ZIP/RAR/7Z/TAR/etc -- it's not a magic wand.
You can't just bippity-boppity-boo and expect it to magically get tiny.

[jagabo]

Yeah, I just tried it with winrar "best" compression, took nearly a gb off a 23gb file

Five percent is an unusually large amount. It must have been a transport stream. Those have the most room for more compression. More typical is about a 1 percent reduction. I just use Microsoft's built in ZIP with an h.264/MKV file and the ZIP file was larger than the MKV.

[justinrye]

Should say I used it on a Blu-ray rip, didn't mention that in the OP as I originally put it in a blu-ray section of the forum.