Movies - MPEG

Compression Rate

This time, the best compressor was SBC Archiver. It was the only compressor to reduce the fileset size by over 7% at the fastest setting. That's a space saving of over 14.5MB. Most of the other data compressors were pretty good at this test too although ARJ32 had a noticeably poorer compression rate of 1.2%.

WinRK and StuffIt were the poorest compressors of the lot. They absolutely did not compress the files, choosing to merely pack the files into the archive.

Compression Speed

ARJ32 and StuffIt were the speed leaders in this test. ARJ32 was truly fast because it actually compressed the files, albeit rather poorly. But StuffIt was only fast because it did nothing more than pack all the files into a single archive. Oddly, WinRK was much slower even though it did the same thing.

The trio of WinRAR, WinZip and gzip were moderately fast, delivering compression speeds of almost 15MB/s. The other compressors, though, were much slower. The slowest compressor was WinAce, which only managed a compression speed of just over 1MB/s. That's over 3 minutes to compress 200MB of MPEG files.

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 WinRAR. Its fast compression speed and good compression rate made it the most efficient compressor in this test. WinZip and gzip were pretty close behind it though. All three were more than 2.5X more efficient than the next most efficient compressor, ARJ32.

The most inefficient compressors were naturally, WinRK and StuffIt. Both compressors did not bother to compress the files. Therefore, their high compression speeds did not count for anything at all. The more inefficent compressor that actually did compress the fileset was WinAce. Although it had a pretty good compression rate, it was just too slow.