Tag: COMPRESSION

7-Zip, one of the most active and mature open source projects, has just reached version 9.20. Work on Version 9 only begun last year, in 2009, but it's already far ahead of the old version (4.65) in terms of speed and functionality. If you've never used 7-Zip before, now's the time to start. In one fell swoop it removes any need for other compressed file managers. It's faster and slimmer than ...

There's a lot of bandwidth being wasted every single second, and Google thinks they've got a pretty snazzy new way to tackle part of the problem. Behold! The new WebP image format! Following in the freshly-trampled footsteps of its video cousin WebM, Google claims that average savings of about 40% over a comparable JPEG can be achieved. Curiously, the image they chose to provide CNet as an ...

Opera Mini 5.1 for Android has been released -- visit m.opera.com, or simply search for 'Opera' on Android Market. This is only a minor patch, but it should be both faster and easy to use. Mini can now also be set as your default browser -- about time! Anyway, without any real way to benchmark Opera Mini 5 against other mobile browsers, I decided to pit it against a desktop browser -- Chrome ...

Upon first reading about Wobzip, I wasn't convinced about the usefulness of a web-based tool to decompress archive files. With my back-breakingly slow 30k/s upload cap, anything over a few megs would be brutal to even submit for processing. In that case, a desktop app like 7zip or Winrar makes infinitely more sense. What I did find handy about the service is its ability to extract files from a ...

HandBrake is a cross-platform utility for ripping and encoding DVDs in high quality, compressed video formats including XviD and H.264. And the latest version of HandBrake lets you use the powerful application to encode any video file, no DVD required. There are a handful of other changes as well, including a GUI for the Linux version, improved video quality, and more control over audio tracks. ...

I'm a big fan of John T. Haller's Portable Apps.com, and I was very excited by one of the apps that appeared in its RSS feed last night: AppCompactor. It is, of course, portable, open source, and designed to integrate with the PortableApps suite. AppCompactor fuses UPX (for exe, dll, and other binary files) and 7zip (for jar and zip files) to compress portable applications. Not surprisingly, ...

If you frequently find yourself browsing on a low-bandwidth connection, you can potentially speed up your browsing experience by using the compressing proxy server at Toonel.net. The concept is simple: install their application on your computer (versions are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun Solaris, and even Windows Mobile and Symbian), then set your proxy settings to point to your localhost ...

WinZip is sort of the Xerox/Kleenex of the compression world. While many geeks prefer alternate file compression utilities like 7-zip, TUGZip, or WinRar, you're more likely to find WinZip installed on any given office computer. And with the launch of WinZip 12, the developers have shown that they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. Probably the biggest changes in WinZip 12 have to do with ...

Want to watch your DVD collection on your iPod, iPhone, PSP, Smartphone, PDA, or Zune? DVD Catalyst is a simple Windows application that can rip a 2 hour movie from your DVD and apply video compression so that the file fits on your portable device's storage card and still looks halfway decent on your mobile screen. DVD Catalyst offers one-click DVD ripping and encoding. Just launch the program, ...

There are probably hundreds of programs that let you convert video files from one format to another. RockPod 08 Lite is another one of them, but it has a few features which make it an ideal choice for anyone looking to cram a few videos on their mobile device. First of all, RockPod features profiles for common mobile devices like iPods, PDAs, Zunes, PSPs, iPhones, and the Eee PC. The last one's ...

Stomp, billed as the ultimate video recompressor for the Mac, has just been upgraded to version 1.4. Stomp is a wonderful piece of software for performing quick and painless video compression. There are a number of presets, such as iPhone, Apple TV, and YouTube, or Web for easy email-able videos (because we're all tired of receiving one gigabyte DV files of your baby's first steps). Stomp also ...

As far as compression utilities go, most distinctly fall into either very good or or very bad. ZipGenius, however, manages to somehow make it into the middle. It comes in two flavors: the suite and standard edition. Since the suite is filled with extras like a file-cutter and FTP add-on, we're going to focus on the core compression utility that comes with the standard edition. First, let's start ...

Anything you can do offline, you can do online these days. Whether you can do it better is another story. YouconvertIt is a new web-based file conversion service. Like Zamzar, YouconvertIt lets you upload audio, video, image, or document files and convert from one format to another. Just select the file from your computer to upload, select your target format, and the web service will send you an ...

UK company Zgroup claims to have perfected technology which allows digital audio files to be shrunk to one quarter of their original size. Forgive us if we're a little doubtful. Company CEO Jamie True said in a press release today, "'ShrinkMyTunes addresses important and specific needs for anyone with a music collection and will be particularly popular with owners of iPod minis and shuffles, as ...

In an industry where the list of HD formats and sizes has already expanded beyond the arguable boundaries of sensibility, Multichannel News has dug up some interesting details on how ABC will be flexing this format just a little more with a new HD online venture. With full episodes of some shows set to debut online in July, ABC will be bending the rules of HD by providing their shows at 1280 x 720 ...