Can someone tell me what settings I need to use to compress files with winrar in windows xp sp2? I can't shrink any files. I tried to compress a 317mb avi video and when winrar finished the rar file was 315mb. Is there a guide available?

PC Settings:

Windows XP Pro SP2

Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz Processor

40GB Internal HD, 160HD External USB HD

nVidia Geforce FxGo 5200 Video Card

512MB RAM

Sigmatel Audio

AVI files are greatly compressed to begin with. You can't comprees it futher using winrar...

I just used the avi file as an example. I can't shrink anything.

What compression option are you choosing?

What compression option are you choosing?

I normally choose "Best" and under archiving options I check everything except delete files after archiving and create sfx archive.

It has to be the kind of files you're trying to compress. I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't compress. You could try reinstalling the software or a different compression program like 7-Zip or IZarc.

I just think the files you're trying to compress are already compressed. Here's an incomplete list of file extentions that typically won't compress well.

zip, rar, ace, tgz, cab, mpg, jpg, avi, ogm, ogg, acc, certain exe (sfx archives mostly), many, many, many more. If you want to see if it's compressing properly, grab a word document without any pictures in it, .doc, not the new office 2007 format as that one has compression built into it last time I checked, and try to compress it. That should give you a fairly good compression rate.

You also can not compress a file if it is encrypted. Here is how to compress a group of files with the command-line version, rar.exe.

rar a -m5 MyArchive.rar *.txt data* c*.exe

The would create an archive called MyArchive.rar using max compression and compress all files ending in txt, all files that start with "data", and all executables that start with "c".

-John

I just think the files you're trying to compress are already compressed. Here's an incomplete list of file extentions that typically won't compress well.

zip, rar, ace, tgz, cab, mpg, jpg, avi, ogm, ogg, acc, certain exe (sfx archives mostly), many, many, many more. If you want to see if it's compressing properly, grab a word document without any pictures in it, .doc, not the new office 2007 format as that one has compression built into it last time I checked, and try to compress it. That should give you a fairly good compression rate.

I think this is my problem. Most of the files that I'm trying to compress are music videos and software. I tried your tip about compressing a word document and I was able to compress a 222mb word file (no, that's not a typo) into a 1.71mb file.

I'm having ome more issue that i need to fix (*sigh*, this is embarassing ).........................how do I change the message in my siggy ?

EDIT: Nevermind! I was going to the wrong screen.

Edited April 1, 200719 yr by adrian2055

I think this is my problem. Most of the files that I'm trying to compress are music videos and software. I tried your tip about compressing a word document and I was able to compress a 222mb word file (no, that's not a typo) into a 1.71mb file.

Yeah, pretty much all media content (music and video) is pre-compressed as uncompressed cd quality audio takes up ~10 megs a minute and video can easily break several hundred megs per minute.