Oh any help how to get the maximum compression out winrar or a step by step guide would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
No, movies and music files are already compressed, so compressing them further won’t gain anything. In fact it will actually increase the file size because compressed files require some overhead. So even winrar won’t help, though it might be convenient to have one big file with everything in it (you can even break it up into multiple part files.)
If you can sacrifice quality, you can encode the videos at a lower bitrate, but that is lossy compression, not lossless. Also, if your videos are in h.264 codec, then transcoding them to h.265 and preserving the quality may be a way to get the files smaller. You would use a tool meant for video, like Handbrake for this, and not winrar or other generic compression tool.
The short answer is no.
You can do an easy experiment to see this using image files. Grab a random JPG file and open it in a graphics program and save it as a BMP format image.
JPG is already compressed, and BMP is absolutely not compressed. Then try compressing each image. You’ll find that the JPG doesn’t get much smaller, or might even be a bit bigger when compressed. Now do the same with the BMP - that one makes for a smaller RAR!
The main issue here is that compression is about removing empty space in a file (it’s a weak analogy but bear with me). If the file itself already had some kind of compression (basically every AVI or MP4 or MKV you download probably is already compressed), then there’s already a lot less empty space inside the file. RAR doesn’t have much empty space left to work with, so it can’t really reduce the file size any more.
It’s worth doing some testing on a single movie to see how this all works. You’ll probably find that it’s best to just leave the files exactly the way they are. No RAR. No ISO. No tricks. The gains simply aren’t there.
If you’re looking to save on some disk space with your movies, you’d get a lot farther by just deleting one movie you don’t really want that badly. The amount of space you get back from that will exceed your compression gains. It also means you don’t have to go and uncompressed the movies every time you want to watch one.
As most have said, doubling up compression won’t usually get you much.
However, video compression is usually designed to facilitate performance of sequential reads because videos are typically played beginning to end, so theoretically there may be ways to compress them more if you’re willing to make sacrifices there.
I doubt RAR is the way to do it, though. It just hasn’t been designed for this kind of data.
Maybe there’s a video compression format out there designed specifically for archival storage, but I’m not aware of it.
ISO won’t get you any further compression, that’s for sure.
You could certainly test this out yourself and let us know if you get any space savings.
Wow, this is a very technical question. Judging by the “does my doggy understand his birthday?” post, I thought you were a r*tared 10-year-old.
Iso is a container format; it’s a 1:1 mapping to how the bits are stored on disk with a header at the start describing the structure. Bin/cue separates the header into a separate file and can include data structured in ways that don’t comply with the ISO-9660 standard.
WinRAR is a compression/decompression program. It supports multiple archive types and compression formats.
Depending on the type of data you are compressing and whether you want lossless or lossy compression, you’ll want to select a different compression algorithm.
Depending on how you plan to use the files, you’ll want to use a different archive format.
Assuming you use the rar archive format, you still have a lot of options to consider. Should the data be encrypted or not? Should the directory structure be encrypted or not? Do you want parity files and segmented archives, so that if one of the parts gets corrupted (or goes missing), you can still extract the original data in a lossless way?
Beyond all that and selecting the compression algorithm that best compresses the type of structured data you’re storing, the general rule is that if you’ve got lots of data, using the largest dictionary and the largest compression window you can will result in the best compression.
So the dictionary is essentially a code book that says “when I see data x, represent it with data y in the file”. The compression window is how much of your original data is loaded into memory at any given time for the dictionary to look at and compress.
[edit] if you’ve got video, the best compression format commonly available today is H.265. This is a lossy compression format, meaning you’ll never be able to precisely recreate the original file. But it’s close enough not to matter at the right compression settings.
And if you’re using H.265, the best container format to stick it in is an MPEG-4 archive (typically with a .mp4 extension).
The result is a highly compressed and structured file. Loading chunks into memory for rar compression will usually result in a larger file, because the data is already compressed in a structured manner that a general compression algorithm can’t match… meaning that you’d get the input of xxxxx resulting in output of yyyyyy.
Just buy another hard drive, damn.
No. And that’s a bad plan. Uncompressed them, and then reencode them to h256/x265 with handbrake (use the SuperHQ 1080p setting). That’s as compressed as they’ll get and you can still watch them without having to unzip them first
TV shows and movies are already compressed. If you try to compress something that’s already compressed, it typically ends up bigger if anything.
Have you tried compressing it again?
Why does it get bigger? I’ve wondered that for a while now.
I would think that compressing something that’s already compressed would still compress it further but at diminishing returns.
Once the files are added to the zip folder your also adding information about the files so they can be removed.
Ohhh you know that makes sense. So, basically, what you’re saying is this?
[Files] = [Files] [Compressed Archive] = [Files] + [Archive Metadata]There’s more to it than that. Firstly, at a theoretical level you dealing with the concepts of entropy and information density. A given file has a certain level of information in it. Compressing it is sort of like distilling the file down to its purest form. Once you reached that point, there’s nothing left to “boil away” without losing information.
Secondly, from a more practical point of view, compression algorithms are designed to work nicely with “normal” real world data. For example as a programmer you might notice that your data often contains repeated digits. So say you have this data: “11188885555555”. That’s easy to compress by describing the runs. There are three 1s, four 8s, and seven 5s. So we can compress it to this: “314875”. This is called “Run Length Encoding” and it just compressed our data by more than half!
But look what happens if we try to apply the same compression to our already compressed data. There are no repeated digits, there’s just one 3, then one 1, and so on: “131114181715”. It doubled the size of our data, almost back to the original size.
This is a contrived example but it illustrates the point. If you apply an algorithm to data that it wasn’t designed for, it will perform badly.
Man compression is way cooler than I imagined.
it was crucial back in the dial-up internet days or even earlier trying to fit games on a floppy disk. mp3 and mpeg4 came from this quest of course too.
I think this example just confused me honestly. Sorry.
Put another way, though, is it basically like a sock being pushed so far inward that it goes inside-out and gets bigger again?
If I use winrar to compress 80gb of tv and movies.
You haven’t gained anything by doing so since video is already compressed. Compressing data that is already compressed will usually make it slightly larger - or if you’re lucky maybe you’ll save like 1 megabyte space, not really anything worth the trouble.
Then can I compress it further by making it an iso?
ISO is not compression.
Bottom line, winrar isn’t the tool to compress video files. In short it’s more complex, but zipping, raring etc… those methods are all the ideal way to compress executables, word documents etc… In short, most likely your video files are already compressed as much as they can be without loss of quality. However if you were to attempt to make them smaller, most likely you’d use something like handbrake or some other video codec converter to actually try to shrink them.
well you can’t compress anything by making it into an iso. Because iso does exactly zero compression whatsoever.
just throw away every second frame. repeat for more compression. at some point you ll be left with a couple of pictures to remember the story and replay it faithfully in your head.
you welcome !
80 gb is not a lot for movies. My average 4K movie is between 60 and 80 gb per movie. If you start encoding and compressing them you start seing compression artifacts and reduction in quality very quickly.
My advice: don’t compress movies if you can. Just get more storage. Storage is relatively cheap these days.
What. If you compress them to zip, 7zip, rar, etc. You will never get any artifacts
I guess they are talking about re-encoding because video files are already compressed.
You can compress with the method above to save more space. But you have to uncompress before watching
If you want to compress video files, you’ll need to reencode them. Maybe using something like HEVC (High Efficiency Video Codec). But for 80GB of videos, you’ll be there for a while and probably won’t shrink them enough to be worth it. It would likely take less time to simply re-download the files later, even with a mediocre internet connection. In practical terms, you won’t get that 80GB to be any smaller.
ISOs don’t compress anything, as far as I know, or at least not by default. I think they’re basically just a container.
To reencode your videos, you can use the free HandBrake.
