I'm a little new at this, so could somebody please tell me what a .rar file is? I see it a lot but have no clue what it is. Thank you for your help

I'm curious where you've seen it a lot as most files I've seen use zip or sit. Never mind though. It's a compression file similar to zip but a little more versatile and more friendly for general transport. The utility you need to open them can be found at http://www.winrar.com/

You need a program called winrar, do a search for it on the net, but be careful. This is like an unzip program and it is used a lot by people who do warez, check it carefully for viruses. Also make sure that it is not a stolen model or program. Marque

We must have both been typing at the same time Questor...lol Marque

Hehe, looks that way doesn't it? :) Gotta love it when that happens.

Actualy I find WinRar to be much more reliable than WinZip. I download stuff on my brother's computer then compress them to burn on CD to take to mine (no internet connection). I have been getting lots of bad CRC errors with zips that way, and can always open them fine with WinRar. I find zips OK for small files, but anything over 10 megs rar is better. (Opinion only - not based on any factual knowledge.) Daeve

RAR has one special advantage over ZIP: with RAR you can make self-extracting 'split archives' out of big files. This makes it possible to post video clips or PZ3 files in eGroups message areas, or to send them via email when the email service has restrictions on message size. The receiver needs no special software; just download all the sections, then run the .EXE section, which reconstitutes the original MPG or whatever.

**more friendly for general transport.**Not until there is a Mac version...

You might also want to check Stuffit which is more versatile & is cross-platform: http://www.aladdinsys.com/expander/

If you are serious about compression, get StuffIt. They are constantly improving their algorithms for a decade now, and claim that SIT archives are "typically" 80% the size of a ZIP archive. There is one thing you should know about any figures like this - for every compression method, there are always files that compress good, and others which don't - so in theory (with the right mix of files) you can get any quote the marketing departements asks for. Nevertheless, all magazine tests that I read (more or less) backed the 80% claim. But there's nothing like a true Poser-related realworld test, eh? Here it comes, WinZIP vs. StuffIt: 1) blMilWom.obj: 3077k ZIP: 812k (26% of uncompressed size) SIT: 716k (23% of uncompressed, 88% of ZIP) 2) blMilWom.rsr: 2268k ZIP: 1047k (46% of uncompressed) SIT: 852k (38% of uncompressed size, 81% of ZIP) 3) Victoria.cr2: 2848 ZIP: 684k (24% of uncompressed size) SIT: 472k (17% of uncompressed size, 69% of ZIP) 4) Poser.exe: 3588k ZIP: 1364k (38% of uncompressed size) SIT: 1262k (35% of uncompressed size, 92% of ZIP) If you look closer about it, then it means that StuffIt is bloody good with "uncompressable" binary files (2+4) and brilliant with typical text files (3). Obj files (1) are a bit between (few values, but quite randomly patterned) but StuffIt still is significantly better than ZIP (although not in the 80% range).

And now the competitor - very interesting result: 1) blMilWom.obj: RAR: 740k (91% of ZIP, 103% of SIT) 2) blMilWom.rsr: RAR: 824k (79% of ZIP, 97% of SIT) 3) Victoria.cr2: RAR: 524k (77% of ZIP, 111% of SIT) 4) Poser.exe: RAR: 1219k (89% of ZIP, 97% of SIT) Obviously, RAR is much better than ZIP, and even an itsy bitsy better with "uncompressable" binary files - two times 97% of SIT in 2) and 4). Nevertheless, it is already weaker with 1) and seriously weaker with the text file in 3). I must also confess that I still stick to StuffIt 5.5, the latest 6 claims to be better/smaller again. So I still would say: if you want to compress for free and like to have everyone (typically) decode without a new tool, stick to any freeware zipper. If you want smallest file sizes and accept that your PC users need to download a new (free) tool, pay for StuffIt.

Ah, but in your test, you neglected to test RAR's greatest strength. RAR will compress multiple files so that any repetitions get overlaid over eachother. ZIP and most other compression techniques only compress individual files. So, for large numbers of files, RAR compresses even better. Also, by changing some of the options (like the hash table), you can squeeze even better compression out of RAR. mr_sanity

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean, unless you refer to multiple files which are very similar. If RAR is some sort of compressed "version history" storage, then it will - of course - be better than both ZIP and SIT. However, you will rarely see a Poser package suitable for that purpose. This is actually what I wrote above - pick up the right mix of files, and you will get every result you like. I'm not into doing a scientific research here, I'll leave that for serious magazines running giant tests. All that I did is to pick up some well known realworld Poser files to get a quick idea. OK, multiple files - I just took the complete Vicki library folder (PC version), 57 files altogether, mixed bag of poses, character, thumbnails, etc. Uncompressed: 3582k ZIP: 840k SIT: 636k (76% of ZIP) RAR: 688k (82% of ZIP)

When I did an animation recently, I ended up with about 10 or 15 different PZ3 files, all with the same characters in them. I assume something like that (with multi-megabytes the same in all files) is where the "multiple file" advantage will occur.

I don't know how many of you guys were around for the First Zip-ARC War, when it seemed every file that you got required a new version of the decoder, I wouldn't want to go through that again!

I did one last final test - this is not for starting a battle of formats, I'm just very interested in these things from a technical point of view... (apologies to Jim... :-) The "overlay" feature of RAR seems to have a real disadvantage - it does not improve compression at all... I took 4 identical copies of the same huge text file and compressed it as SIT and RAR - guess what? SIT was still smaller. This means that RAR is not a "version history" format that calculates deltas between files, it really only re-uses some internal tables. This might give a positive result in just one (very special) case: If you have a set of files where each is constructed out of some few large identical blocks that repeat itself across the whole set of files. This is something that you can easily construct (by setting up files to give maximum results against the other formats), but it's something that you will never see in the real world, I'm afraid. I'm also very disappointed about the compression options - the default "best guess" is already the end of the story - although everything else is either faster or slower, it typically gives larger files in the end, up to twice the size of even ZIP! Looks like StuffIt will stay monopolist for yet some more time... :-)

Someone do WinAce...I've heard some pretty good things about it...