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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.