Anyone know how to compress large Gig files ?

[The Rig]

As title asks, i have a 5 gig file on disc and need to compress it to about 1 gig or less.
Any utilities out there ??
Any qucik launch links available?
Cheers....

[DarrenH]

unless its a text file it is physically impossible to compress it that much. back to the drawing board mon amis

[Orbital]

zip it with winzip and then that will be roughly the how much you will be able to zip it with any program

[DarrenH]

ive seen a program called UHA which does a better job that any other mainstream utility. But you want to chop off 4 gb, you are fookin trippin.

[SimonT]

What sort of disc holds 5 gig? is it a dvd?

[JohnnyB]

5Gig, thats a biggy! If its a film or something, cant you just change to a different CoDec? Of course it all depends on what the file type is as to how much it can be compressed by winzip...

Apparently:

The DVD-ROM specification supports disks with capacities of from 4.7GB to 17GB and access rates of 600 KBps to 1.3 MBps

i've only ever seen 4.7Gig discs though.

[Big Bad Al]

Get a couple of compression thingies like winzip, winrar, UHA and maybe a couple more and compress it with one, then the next one, then the next one, etc until it`s the right size or you run out of compression utilities!!lmao lmao


The only downside to all this is that you will need all the same compression utils at `the other end` to un-compress them...(Obviously!) Duh!!

[DarrenH]

have youever tried this cavvy ? the file actually gets bigger cause of all the library files from each utility.

[Engine_Swap]

I agree with oddball....it just aint possible and you can zip it so far then the file actually gets larger as you are zipping it!!!

[The Rig]

i`ve heard of GZIP, supposed to zip gig files to half their size, ??
just thought i`d ask you guys if you knew of anything else thats all.
cheers for the replies.

[Durzel]

Originally posted by 0ddball
have youever tried this cavvy ? the file actually gets bigger cause of all the library files from each utility.

0ddball is spot on.

Binary data is not very uncompressed, so compressing it with ANY utility only ever yields average results (5%-20% compression). Compressing text files is an entirely different thing altogether... try downloading a pure ASCII text file someday and if your ISP is clued up you'll appear to download it a lot faster than your modem/line is capable of.

It's also true that beyond a certain point (normally 1 pass on maximum compression) compressing a ZIP file will just make it bigger, because of the added header information that has to be added.

GZIP is a Unix based utility, which has greater compression than Winzip - but you'd never seen 1Gb from 3Gb+ of non-textual data.