Has anyone tried KGB Archiver?
 

Well, It's pretty old news but maybe some of you aware already about this compression tool. KGB archiver, as mentioned in digg, it could compress 430 mb ms office iso to 1,44 mb. I think it's too surreal to believe, honestly I want to try experimenting by myself, but I would like to know if anyone else have done it before.

What is your most exterme result when using KGB archiver? Is 1,5 gb ram good enough to compress at "maximum" level?

I haven't tried it but geez, you'd need your own computer just to compress/uncompress stuff.

Actually, quote one person:

"takes 2-3 days to uncompress- on an average computer. So, yeah. Go play somewhere else now."

Hoy, I can just see telling people "Okay, can't use the computer for the next few days. Gotta uncompress Linux". Then again...with certain Linux distros...

not good to compress with KGB,will take like forever to uncompress it like 2 day same what mortis say.

7Zip takes long enough to decompress that I don't use it. RAR will be fine for me.

The problem with KGB archiver is that it has become the compression format of choice for some...very undesirable content that can be found on the Internet. I personally would never download a kgb compressed file simple because of the infamy of the archives' use.

It's a PAQ algorithm, slow by nature. Interesting that this experimental algorithms have finally found a way into a "mainstream tool" *g*
I remember UHARC giving excellent compression too.

I only use 7zip currently, it's opensource and has better ratio than RAR and Zip. With a sane config the compression speed is very good.

seconding this. RAR is god and has been since 1997 for me.

Also, I find it quite unbelievable to compress an MS Office installer down to a floppy.

True.

Fun fact - LZMA, the algorithm used by 7zip for the .7z format, compresses both better and faster than BZip2, which is used for many Linux source tarballs and other such things.

Oh, wait, not always. See, BZip2 eats LZMA's lunch when it comes to compressing text.

Point is that different algorithms work differently and with varying levels of efficiency on varying types of data. If KGB can squeeze a disc image down to such a tiny sliver of its initial size, I can almost guarantee that there's some other kind of data on which it cannot operate nearly as formidably.

As for 7zip, in my experience it's been pretty quick to compress and decompress, but maybe you guys are RARing different kinds of files. I usually use it for installers and for my unattended Windows setup work.

I use it for console games, where it gets much better ratios because theres a lot of cd tracks to compress. Thats one field where rar totally trashes 7z.

That's because RAR does apply specific optimizations to known file formats. You could do the same for 7Zip and add detection of WAV formats, which are then handled by say the FLAC compressor, WAVPack, etc.

LZMA is really not the first choice when it comes to lossless audio compression, but it's a pretty good algorithm for generic data compression.

The point is that RAR describes both a proprietary algorithm and a file format / container format. You can't really compare RAR against LZMA. You could however compare the generic RAR algorithm (the one used when no special case handling is done) with LZMA, PPMD, etc.
Also the 7zip container format is open, it should be possible to add special case handling, so choosing lossless audio compression for data that benefits from that. It's just a matter of someone to implement this.