RAR File Format

[Gandalf Parker]

I know that its difficult to word a poll in an unbiased manner but sheeeesh....
"I am unwilling or unable"? If the poll just said rar, zip, gz, exe, or installer.. and had no other words to give any clues.. then I would probably have chosen zip.

I guess if my only choices were between RAR or EXE then I would choose rar for SEIV mods.

[Fyron]

Gandalf Parker said:
I know that its difficult to word a poll in an unbiased manner but sheeeesh....
"I am unwilling or unable"? If the poll just said rar, zip, gz, exe, or installer.. and had no other words to give any clues.. then I would probably have chosen zip.

I guess if my only choices were between RAR or EXE then I would choose rar for SEIV mods.

Zip was never an option... There was no bias. This was never meant as a general format poll; it was only meant to determine if there is any need to continue adding the self-extracting modules. I may not have made that entirely clear...

Arkon said:
Yeah, I noticeed it was becoming popular, so I got WinRAR back in my Windows days. And I'm pretty sure I have one for Linux. My question is why. I used it to archive some MPEG's, then some JPEG's and it did only 1% compression, no better than Winzip really.

Do people like the splitting ability, the advanced repair ability, or does everyone just hate the zip format now that Microsoft started bundling it with XP?

As Alneyan mentioned, JPEGs are already highly compressed. No archive compression algorithm can do very much with a file that is already as compressed as a JPEG. Only relatively uncompressed or completely uncompressed files can be compressed very much. Compare archives of text files and bitmaps, two completely uncompressed file formats. Wave files work too. The point is that ZIP is a very innefficient format compared to pretty much all other archive formats. It is an obselete format. It is just not a proprietary format, or highly associated with open source, and it is currently the most popular format, so it is the only one that Microsoft chose to support natively in XP. Unless SP 2 added Gzip support...

The other advanced features are a plus, but there are a lot of other archive formats that have them too (such as ACE and possibly 7zip and Gzip, but I am not too familiar with those). Rarsoft just plays the marketing game better.

[Gandalf Parker]

Imperator Fyron said:

Zip was never an option... There was no bias. This was never meant as a general format poll; it was only meant to determine if there is any need to continue adding the self-extracting modules. I may not have made that entirely clear...

Ahhh I had the impression that it was seeking a general consensus of all of the modders and download sites. That it was a personal question wasnt clear.

There are obvious pros and cons I guess. RAR's give a time-download boost for a "but you must first download and install" instruction. EXE's give less personal control on the install but can be more helpful for automating where things should go and a level of newbie friendliness. Also EXE's involve an extra layer of trust on the part of the user.

Personally I have a RAR extractor. But then I have a couple dozen different format extractors and Im always a slight bit irritated when Im told to go get another.

[Suicide Junkie]

Gandalf Parker said:
I know that its difficult to word a poll in an unbiased manner but sheeeesh....
"I am unwilling or unable"? If the poll just said rar, zip, gz, exe, or installer.. and had no other words to give any clues.. then I would probably have chosen zip.

I guess if my only choices were between RAR or EXE then I would choose rar for SEIV mods.

Option #1 is for those who have it installed.
Option #2 is for those who might install it.
Option #3 is for those who are not going to install it.

I think that covers the bases quite nicely.
Its not about your preferred format or anything, its about having RAR capability or not.

[mottlee]

Some of the "Newbees" may not know what RAR is! I did not till I was in the forum for some time, there will be the tryed and true die hards for winzip too.