Have you guys heard of something called UHarc? I just found out today, because I had this file with extension .uha, and I wanted to know what it was. It's an interesting thing.
UHarc is a compression algorithm, written by Uwe Herklotz. It's still in version 0.6a, but seems to be really good. Its limitation is that the overall uncompressed files can't be sized over 2GB. It's got multimedia support, whatever that is. I'm assuming that this means that it will better compress multimedia files.
I've just run a little comparison here. UHarc is much slower than ZIP and RAR, but the files get a lot smaller. I've compressed 176 Word files (50 MB) with WinZip, WinRAR and WinUHA, all using their best possible compression. These are the results:
| |
WinZIP |
WinRAR |
WinUHA |
| Time to compress (mm:ss) |
00:13 |
01:07 |
04:56 |
| Compressed size (MB) |
26.4 |
24.9 |
19.8 |
As we can see here, the UHarc format compressed the files at a much better ratio, but it took much, much longer. So, if you really have time, I suggest you use UHA. If you don't, well, if you don't, use ZIP. As seen here, the gain of RAR over ZIP is not too big, and it took almost 6 times more time than ZIP (at least with these files).
Of couse this is not a valid test, it's just an example. As I said I've used only Word files, and they usualy compress really well. They were all small files, and I had only 50MB of them. Still, I think UHA is something worth of a look. Another interesting point is that WinUHA is freeware, with no ads (as in you don't pay anything, not as in "free software" - source code is not available), while WinZIP and WinRAR are both sharewares.
There you go. If you have more information on UHarc, send feedback!