Thread: the best zipping thingy ever - lzip!

better then rar? o_o

yeah, totally. read the thing.

you can zip things good... so?

Say you have a drive with, say, a 1GB file. this can zip it to 20MB. USE IT! :D

I downloaded it but winzip is useless... I'll fnid some way to unzip it properly...

Ahh, well that's why - it's lossy compression!! That means that when you compress something with it and then uncompress it, you won't end up with exactly what you started with. This could be okay for things like images, audio files, and videos, but you wouldn't want to do this with text or executables. In a text document, for example, it would eliminate certain letters in order to optimize its compression abilities.. this would not be good! In an executable, like a .EXE in the Windows world, it would probably corrupt the file so that it couldn't even run at all! They say that there's no drawbacks, so I'm beginning to think this may even be a joke. Maybe I'll try it out to see what happens.

Also, compressing a 200MB file down to 15% isn't that crazy, even with lossless compression. It depends on the file contents. Text files compress much better, in general, than binaries since there's a limited number of characters being used and so there's a lot of repetition.

Originally posted by Zaphod
Ahh, well that's why - it's lossy compression!! That means that when you compress something with it and then uncompress it, you won't end up with exactly what you started with. This could be okay for things like images, audio files, and videos, but you wouldn't want to do this with text or executables. In a text document, for example, it would eliminate certain letters in order to optimize its compression abilities.. this would not be good! In an executable, like a .EXE in the Windows world, it would probably corrupt the file so that it couldn't even run at all! They say that there's no drawbacks, so I'm beginning to think this may even be a joke. Maybe I'll try it out to see what happens.

Also, compressing a 200MB file down to 15% isn't that crazy, even with lossless compression. It depends on the file contents. Text files compress much better, in general, than binaries since there's a limited number of characters being used and so there's a lot of repetition.

It is crazy, it can even compress to 0%. :) Yes, go check them out... You are wrong too! They say that like, half the time it just removes useless stuff so you won't notice.

Besides. jpgs are lossy, and you use them, and they work fine!

And it's on sourceforge..they have a "no shit" policy so if it was bad it would of been deleted.

omg it works i just lzipped my whole mp3 collection and send it to kaniaz with his poor 56k and he got it in 40 minutes and now he's listening to all my fooking fave mp3s and he's lovin all the misfits stuff i sent him ahahah

Yes, it's definitely a joke, upon reading the FAQ in detail. Sorry to ruin it for anyone .

And if anyone wants to know why, there are numerous indications in the FAQ, including how the algorithm works. If you want some more explanations, let me know and I'll post some.

Originally posted by Zaphod
Yes, it's definitely a joke, upon reading the FAQ in detail. Sorry to ruin it for anyone :wink:.

And if anyone wants to know why, there are numerous indications in the FAQ, including how the algorithm works. If you want some more explanations, let me know and I'll post some.

Are you saying we're liars? That's not cool at all, Zaphod. >:|

DUDE NO I JUST FREAKING STARTED LZIPPING ALL MY IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS AND DELETING THE ORIGINAL FILES, AND THEN I DEFREGGED AND ZEROFILLED ALL MY AVAILABLE DISKSPACE WTF NO

Originally posted by Kaniaz+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Kaniaz)</div>

It is crazy, it can even compress to 0%[/b]

You can't compress something to 0% and then restore anything from that. 0% means NOTHING is there anymore. Compressing an MP3 to 0% would give the exact same output as compressing the entire contents of the Internet to 0%, and there is absolutely NO WAY to tell what was originally there, because you have NOTHING to work with!

<!--QuoteBegin-Kaniaz
Besides. jpgs are lossy, and you use them, and they work fine!

Yes, jpg's are lossy. The reson they work fine is because they remove/alter things slightly so that you don't notice that the picture has been changed (most of the time). The higher the compression ratio you use, the more noticible the loss becomes. The same goes for video and audio. But this can NOT be done for most other types of data.

Some indications of this whole thing being a joke are, under the benefits,

You may also gain a new appreciation for backup devices[/b]

(since you're destroying your data if you do this)
and

permanent (irretrievable) archiving[/b]

(ie. you can archive your files, but you can't get them back)

Also, the algorithm that they describe is just plain silly. And read the license that they released it under. Not to mention the warnings in the download section:

Attempting to compress the lzip or lunzip programs themselves will trap your system in an infinite loop, and may cause the platter from your hard disks to shoot out of their drive bays at close to the speed of sound. Attempting to uncompress either of the exectuables will suck your computer into a minature black hole, which we believe from our benchmarks (speculatively) exits in an anitmatter universe parallel to our own. If you are interested in exploring this possibilty, please write to us once you get there.[/b]

Wow, I find it pretty sad you are actually justifying it. Of course i know it's not going to work. It's a joke man. >:|

Are you saying we're liars? That's not cool at all, Zaphod. >[/b]

Sorry Kaniaz, that's not my intent.. it's just that I know this thing is a hoax and I didn't want anyone to lose anything by trying it out. Apparently it's too late, after reading CT's post.

Sorry if I sounded like an ass.

Originally posted by Kaniaz
It is crazy, it can even compress to 0%.

Oh I can tell you how to do that by hand. open the file you want to compress in a text editor, select all, hit delete, save.

It's ok. You can't lose anything. Download it and rename the program to a .jpg. You will understand. :P

Originally posted by Kaniaz
Of course i know it's not going to work.

Oh... well I have know idea how much you know about this stuff, so I didn't want you to screw anything up. So CT, you were just joking, right?

its cool man, i laughed my ass off when i read this http://lzip.sourceforge.net/license.html

LOL! I didn't actually fully read the license.. that's awesome. Anyway, I guess you guys suckered me in.

Wooo! Go monkey with the bananas!

it wont work for me... im using cygwin and when i do the ./install.sh it completes but then i type "lzip 3 file" and it says command not found

This is for real though: http://www.7-zip.org/

Compresses to 24% or something.

Squall, I've had enough of zipping programs... keep away!!!

I remember a joke in the warez community (I forgot the joke) about using winzip on 3dsmax. It almost always got a 600mb iso to like 30 some mb. Most people didn't belive it was the real thing so they would give us crap.