Testing Cont.

PNG/JPG Compression

I took about 59846656KBs of random lossless PNG and lossy JPG files and compressed. They best compressed as a BZIP2 file and shrank to 58490880KBs at 2.2654165% compression. That's because BZIP2 does the best compressing for types of files that are already compressed A.K.A. hard to compress.

MP3 Compression

347832320KBs of MP3 files best compressed as a BZIP2 file and shrank to 340414464KBs at 2.13259538% compression. MP3s are not very compressable since they are already compressed. I think that's the trend for BZIP2; working best on already compressed files or hard to compress files.

Review Compression

Well, the compressing of a Unique Hardware review of 360448KBs was best done as a 7-ZIP file. to shrink to a size of 303200KBs at 15.8825% compression. A review is mostly text and a few pictures. So this would be the type of file most people compress; text and pictures.

Website Compression

When I compressed all of Unique Hardware (except the forums), the 91975680KBs shrink to a size of 83480576KBs at 9.2362503% compression. This is similar to the review compression test except much more files and most of them being pictures.

So what's the best?

Well, from these sets of tests, it's safe to say that 7-ZIP is the best compression. Although I feel WinRAR has the best interface and WinZIP the best compression time, 7-ZIP is the best for one great reason; It compresses the best! As you can tell I don't really care for the time it takes to compress files, but if it does matter to you, WinZIP is your best bet, although 7-ZIP, WinRAR and WinACE had around the same times. 7-ZIP can also compress as BZIP2 files, so when you have things that are very hard to compress you can choose BZIP2.

Back | Continue