packARC v0.7RC6 (Release Candidate)

[packDEV]

Hi everyone,


Here's an almost finished packARC v0.7 for you to test. packARC is an archiver with support for writing and reading SFX files. This one includes three of my known compression algorithms and one completely new, universal compressor:

• packJPG v2.5
• packMP3 v1.0
• packPNM v1.4
• packARI v0.6

I'm still working on this, it doesn't even include a proper readme file yet. Compared to the last version, several things are new:

• support for archives over 2GB (still needs testing)
• more compression algorthms, obviously
• drag and drop support
• handling of directories
• backwards compatibility with the old version

I'll release a better tested, possibly unchanged version soon.

Keep in mind that the concept for this is to be a media archiver for MP3/JPG rather than being a truly universal archiver. It can perfectly handle the occasional TXT/PDF/DOC/other file, but it is not intended to be used for large files such as ISOs. Don't expect any wonders for packARI - it is, after all, just an arithmetic encoder with an nth order Markov model. There are decent results for text files and many others, though.

If you should stumble over a bug, please let me know!

[kampaster]

Hi
lzma2 * * *2 104 Byte
packarc * 3 017 Byte

[schnaader]

Hi
lzma2 * * *2 104 Byte
packarc * 3 017 Byte

Hm.. quite useless test. What you get is mainly a comparison of the archive headers, because the file is so small.

401 White&Black.jpg (original)
388 White&Black.jpg.7z (7-Zip Ultra)
234 White&Black.pjg (PackJPG 2.5a)

[zody]

Awesome! Especially for sharing photos over the internet...

would be great if it could use more than one core -> simply by processing two/four/... JPGs in multiple threads

[SvenBent]

anyway to integrate lzma2 instead of ari into it ?

i'm guessing this tool was meant mostly for jpg and mp3 collections that might have small description files paly list etc etc so tht ari would be fine to just grab those rrare and small files

but i would love a strong asynchron archive like 7-zip (lzma2) but with special compressor for already compressed "multimedia" files


Anyway good jpeg very impressive

so its .acc data next ?

[Stephan Busch]

.aac won't give the same compression ratios.

[Shelwien]

I have an old demo which shows about 15% gain for AAC LC
(it was the next project after mp3zip, but we discarded it in favor of a proprietary codec).
And overall my impression was that with aac its actually possible to gain more than with mp3,
because it has more "unnecessary" metainfo comparing to mp3 (like huffman table ids).

[Stephan Busch]

Can you provide that old demo?

[binarysoup]

Impressive compression on many of my mp3's, I've tried and been impressed by the jpg compression in earlier versions. Also I was wondering if you had had any thoughts on getting linux sfx files working without having to use the .exe extension which usually launches files using wine in Linux environments.

[packDEV]

anyway to integrate lzma2 instead of ari into it ? so its .acc data next ?

I'll see about LZMA2 compression. As for AAC: nothing planned yet, but maybe someday .

Impressive compression on many of my mp3's, I've tried and been impressed by the jpg compression in earlier versions. Also I was wondering if you had had any thoughts on getting linux sfx files working without having to use the .exe extension which usually launches files using wine in Linux environments.

Linux and Mac OS files (with proper SFX stub) are already worked on. The final release should be very soon.

[binarysoup]

Linux and Mac OS files (with proper SFX stub) are already worked on. The final release should be very soon.

Music to my ears, again huge thanks for your excellent work.

[toino2000]

Packarc doesn't support the drag and drop of folder with . and some other specials symbols in his name. (there is the same problem if the folder where the folder you want to drag and drop has specials symbols.)

[load]

wow, great work here! really nice, thanks a lot.

[load]

any news here?

[packDEV]

any news here?

Coming up - I'm just updating the package.