Movies - MPEG

Compression Rate

This time, the best compressor was WinRK. It was the only compressor to reduce the fileset size by over 8%. That's a space saving of over 16.5MB. Most of the other data compressors were pretty good at this test too, with compression rates of 6-7%.

StuffIt was the poorest compressor of the lot. It absolutely did not compress the files, choosing to merely pack the files into the archive. It was the same thing we saw it did with tough files to compress, like MP3 and DivX files.

Compression Speed

StuffIt was naturally the speed leader but only because it did nothing more than pack all the files into a single archive. Of the compressors that did real work, gzip was the fastest. It managed a compression speed of over 13.3MB/s.

WinZip and ARJ32 were also very fast, delivering compression speeds of about 9.7MB/s. The other compressors though were much slower. But the slowest compressor, by a light year, was WinRK. It actually took an astounding 18.7 minutes to compress this fileset.

Compression Efficiency

The compression efficiency rating is a simple way to evaluate the efficiency of each data compressor. This way, we can see which compressor can save the most space in the least time.

Please note that a higher efficiency rating does not mean the compressor is better. It just means the compressor has a better compression-to-speed ratio. A more efficient compressor is, of course, always more desirable than a less efficient one.

The most efficient data compressor when it comes to MPEG video clips was gzip. Its very fast compression speed and reasonably good compression rate made it the most efficient compressor in this test. WinZip and ARJ32 were pretty close behind it though. All three were more than twice as efficient as the next most efficient compressor, bzip2.

The most inefficient compressors were naturally, WinRK and StuffIt with WinRK attaining this dubious honour entirely to its extremely slow compression speed while StuffIt was most inefficient only because it did not "stuff it" again.