Compressing to Rar?

[PTsniper]

Hello everyone.

I was ondering if anyone could tell me how to compress a video file to a Rar or Zip one.
I want to send this file to a person but I would like to occupy as less as possible.

Thanks in advance.

[pchan]

You need to have RAR or ZIP installed in your PC. Just point to the file and right-click. You then compressed it. If I am not wrong, WinXP is able to extract ZIP compressed file even user don't ZIP installed. Definitely not RAR. If you send RAR compressed file, the receiving party must have RAR installed in his/her PC in order to uncompressed it. For pictures or EXE files, the reduction is file size is about 20%. Whereas, excel file, you can achieve more than 50%.

[mats.hogberg]

No different from RARing or ZIPing anything else - but unless it's uncompressed AVI we're talking about, video can't be compressed at all. The compression is already done, so to speak. "Compressed" audio like MP3 behaves the same way.

/Mats

[PTsniper]

Thans to both.

[RabidDog]

dont bother zipping or raring a video file .. you are likely to get a file that is bigger than the original. Try it and see.

[ricardouk]

You can use winff to compress it further to flv,wmv etc, if its just for a casual view use it.

[AlecWest]

dont bother zipping or raring a video file .. you are likely to get a file that is bigger than the original. Try it and see.

Depends on the format of the video file. I operate a mirror site for the Star Trek New Voyages videos (all DVD ISO files, RARed) and have achieved between a 7% and 9% reduction in size - which translates to an upload and download taking that much less time.

http://stnv.net/iso.html

[jman98]

AlecWest - Star Trek New Voyages rocks!!! I'm surprised about RAR reducing file size though as I didn't think it would really do that.

I do think I should warn PTsniper to be prepared just in case he uses RAR and someone complains about a RAR file being corrupted. If you're just sending them via email you'll probably be OK though. I despise RAR. I swear I think it means "Please split my archive into a million tiny pieces and hopelessly corrupt some of them so that the archive will never work when they are put back together." They HAD to invent PAR recovery files to go along with RAR because RAR is such a piece of crap. I'd advise going with ZIP because many people don't understand RAR and ZIP is less prone to problems. I'm sure someone will post and say that they have sent/received over a thousand diffent RAR files and never ever had a problem. That's great. That hasn't been my experience, but my point is just to point out a potential problem, not to insist that it will happen every time.

[AlecWest]

jman98,

FWIW, I don't split RAR files into parts ... though some mirror sites do. And, before I upload a RAR file, I "unRAR" it first to make sure it's not corrupted. Of course, corruption can take place during any upload or download ... but that's just as true of an ISO upload or download as it is for a RAR upload or download. So far, though, I haven't had any complaints.

BTW, and mind you - my WinZip version is not the latest version, my WinZip won't allow me to ZIP anything over about 2 gigs. Otherwise, I'd use it. RAR doesn't have that issue.

[PTsniper]

Thank you guys for all the help.

[BJ_M]

if you include a recovery record with a rar file - you dont need a par file per say ....

ive never had issues with rar files either ... corruption usually comes from faulty ftp (or other) software or other local factors