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How much is too much?

catgoat1792 - Apr 23, 2002

		catgoat1792		Apr 23, 2002
			someone told me i can ACE, then ZIP, then RAR an iso to get maximum compression. Is this damaging to the file at all, or is it okay to triple compress?

		Gear		Apr 23, 2002
			Just compress once, don't waste your time.

		ExCyber		Apr 23, 2002
			It's not damaging to the file at all, but it is damaging to the sanity of people who want to use them. There's also no guarantee that you won't end up increasing the file size. This seems counterintuitive, but it's pretty much a mathematical certainty that any given compression algorithm can never compress all possible input streams, so you might just end up adding the dictionary/header/signature overhead.

		catgoat1792		Apr 23, 2002
			thanks

		archiver		Apr 23, 2002
			I think the source code for MAME is the only thing I've ever seen to benenfit from double compression (zip). I zip rar files simply to serve as a wrapper (set in "store" setting), simply because I've had one too many rar archives go bad.

		ExCyber		Apr 23, 2002
			I'm pretty sure that the MAME source double-ZIP thing is just a hack to make it the ZIP equivalent of a solid archive. Since it's got lots of small files with substantial redundancy across those files (MAME uses a lot of macros, for instance; it's almost like its own programming language), it benefits from this.