Oh any help how to get the maximum compression out winrar or a step by step guide would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
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.
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 !
well you can’t compress anything by making it into an iso. Because iso does exactly zero compression whatsoever.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
Just buy another hard drive, damn.
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.
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.
Put the data inside a mini-blackhole and activate Future Gadget #8 PhoneWave (name subject to change)
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.
To get the maximum compression out of video you should use a video codec like av1 or hevc. WinRAR wont compress video well at all and making it an ISO is also pointless.
I would suggest checking out handbrake for a good user friendly video compression tool.
For lossless compression, things other then video/audio, you should movr to 7zip over winRAR.
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.
