Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer invented the zip feature to Windows Explorer. He sold it as a shareware program when Microsoft contacted him to buy it. The Microsoft person that contacted him was unaware that he worked under Dave Custler's Windows NT dev team. I believe they came to an agreement. Dave also created task manager as a side project.
here is a mindblower tip for designers and everyone else. if you ever receive a pptx file and you want to extract all pictures from it for your more prettier presentation in InDesign or whatever - replace .pptx extension with .zip... extract and voilà
Yeah, I do screen recordings and presentation recordings in PowerPoint and then just pull the footage out. Better than exporting it which on junk work laptops takes forever!!
Allot of programs uses standard zip formats to compress their saved files. They name them with their extension to let you distinguish them from other zip files in your downloads etc. Many actually list the fact they are zip files in their built in docs somewhere. Some of these files even auto open in zip utilities like 7 zip which can detect some zip file formats regardless of the ext used. Try it out sometime change the ext on a zip file and double click it with 7 zip as your default zip program. Almost all zip utils will open a file as a zip file by opening it from with in the program it self when you explicitly tell it to by putting in *.* then loading the file. The program simply looks at the files header info see what type of file it is and pens it accordingly. If you want to do some goofy stuff open up a dll in a hex editor and change the file header to make a zip util think it is a zip file. Unlike renaming a ext causing the program to just kick and error out it will try it's best to unzip it LOL
I'm actually surprised you guys didn't cover "zip bombs" or "Zipper bombs". Where people upload rarfiles that are "what you were hoping to download" only to find that after a few seconds when you uncompress it, your entire pc crashs and whatever disk you unzipped too is now permanently locked because the person who made the zip filled it and compressed it with more data than your HDD or ssd could handle. Now I know this has been fixed depending on your version of windows. But that's just it, it depends on your version of windows. Afaik this still works on everything from OG windows to windows 10.
There are compressed formats like dwarfs that let you mount them as filesystems so you can access all data without the need for decompressing single files out of the compressed one. It runs the decompression at runtime meaning you can run a whole game directly from a .dwarfs file.
@@kuromiLayfewhat? My mac just unzip it for me and delete the zip right after downloading. I thought it would be a good idea mounting it if it's not a big heavily compressed file
@@kuromiLayfe not really, mainly .dmg (disk image) files and most of those are read only, though some allow read/write. zip and other compressed files on mac can't even be viewed in finder until you unzip them
@@1pcfred But on the other hand, uncompressed ZIP does not differ that much from virtual HDD (aka VHD file) In fact Java uses zip for its executable and resource files, JARs. By default it have tools to treat zipped file like a folder.
Of note, is that Microsoft Office documents these days are ZIP files, with their embedded elements like graphics etc. being represented by separate files within the ZIP, and XML files tying it all together. This is soooo much nicer than the old way of doing things which involved OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) formats which basically involved serialising objects to disk from memory. It's one of the reasons why Outlook PST and MSG files are only fully supported by Outlook on Windows, and why Microsoft desperately wants to get away from them.
As someone who has a large databank of personal files of various formats, it makes sense to compress all that stuff with ZIP/RAR to the highest available level. Talking about data you just store and don't access so often. Part of my databank are programs, that I never want to miss. And you can make them so much smaller by compressing - and many of them just install out of the RAR folder fine. Where it also pays off big time, is Photoshop files. Highly depending on the contents, some Photoshop files can be 90% smaller when compressed. When colorful high-res photos are part of those PSDs, expect less compression, but when it's a lot about forms and layers, much of that can be compressed.
Zips have their advantages but it's worth knowing that windows has compressed folders. I'm not sure what the compression level is like though. Useful if you want to save space but not have the drawbacks that come with working with archive formats. Personally though, I just tend to buy bigger hard-drives.
i first used 7zip to compress files, just cuz it saved slightly more space. but the whole data recovery features winrar has makes it way better in the long run, so i used it for everything now
they are shilling hard lol, but their 1-2% better compression does not matter when winrar has better file recovery options, perfect for long term storage. a perfect example was when i downloaded a rar file on a torrent and it got stuck on 97%. i simply used the rebuild feature and the files became 100% despite not me downloading everything
I adore the 7z ultimate compression. I shrank 140 GB of dds texturs to just under 24 GB. It took forever to compress tho. But decompression is actually hardware accelerated now. @@overbored1337
Unfortunately, WinRar CAN do something to files compressed using it that make them not decompressible with 7-zip. It's rare to run into it, but something to be aware of. Also, no, it's not that it's passworded. As something of an ancient games enjoyer, I occasionally run into ancient copies of games compressed with WinRar that just error out when you try to decompress them with 7-zip, but WinRar can still handle them fine.
I'm actually really happy with this video. As someone who used WinRar from pretty much day 1, I recently got surprised by the fact I can just cut and paste files from some zip files without needing to extract. In some cases that kind of direct approach was really handy but I was confused why some Zips didn't do that the same way. 1:46 Oh so that only got added later? Yeah okay I got into winrar in XP days so figures that I never knew this I guess
Yeah, Zip Folders features wasn't available in Windows 98 or Windows 2000; it could be added by installing Microsoft Plus! product. Later, Windows XP had it out of the box.
Macs just unload the contents into a folder when you open the zip file. It’s like, “Look, we know these files will be extracted anyway, so let’s skip that preview step completely.” I find that convenient.
Windows's built in zip/rar support is much appreciated, but also has a lot to improve on. Most of the time it's slow as hell, taking about twice as much time, if not more, than WinRAR. If that wasn't enough it also throws out corruption errors fairly often even if the files are perfectly fine and extracting with winrar instead works perfectly fine
Kinda reminds me how I had Worms Armagedon on my school's server without our IT guy being able to find it, because we had .bat file on usb that was unpacking the game for us to play and deleting the unpacked game when we were done. All done on server itself, since it was an actual PC, unlike our workstations that struggled to run WinXP in less than 5 minutes. (From loading OS screen to actually usable OS desktop).
There's a 7zip plugin for Total Commander, which brings the functionality to be able to access the contents of 7z files without the actual program within Total Commander. 🙂 But installing the actual 7zip also can be handy, because it adds an option to open files like if those were archives without modifying the file extension.
WinRAR has been great using it for encryption and best compression. Fun fact, Google Driver's copyright scanner won't work on encrypted files, and there's an easy "store" option for no compression.
actually 7z has slight better compression in most cases, but winrar has better file recovery options, like your file can suffer a ton of bitrot or damage and the data can be rebuilt, on 7zip the whole thing is lost
A zip file is like a file system and can be written to by editing the end of central directory. So a program can load all files needed without extracting the entire zip. Such a function can be done on linux with a FUSE driver
@@Napoleonic_S No, Windows 3.1 didn't handle long filename at all, this support was added in Windows 95 only. Windows file handling APIs have a limit to a name of a file, its absolute path must not exceed 260 characters (MAX_PATH). Modern systems support paths longer than this limit, yet it requires the programmer to handle it.
I feel that one aspect that could've been mentioned (but I understand why they didn't) is the fact that compressing data is essentially finding repetitions in the data and creating substitutions. After that it's just different and more clever ways of finding such instances. This does, however, raise the question on how to fundamentally handle it; do you take each file and compress each individually, or do you take *all* the data and compress it all at once. The first approach; you can decompress each file individually, but you leave some efficiency on the table The second approach; you can find a repetition instance with data that doesn't belong to a single file making it more efficient, but you need to decompress all the files even if you only open a single one (though that can be done in the background)
@@shanent5793 I thought about mentioning it last night when I posted first and decided against it because, for the user experience, it's the same as the 'just compress everything' option, but you're absolutely right and it's a fundamentally different way of treating the compression job. That'll teach me to post late night comments :P
A feature of WinRAR that I don't know if anyone ever noticed before was that it would extract DLL's when you double click to run an executable from inside of an archive, of any format that it could handle. I haven't used it in about two decades, so I don't know if it extracted all DLL's in the same folder or if it scanned the .exe file to look for imports, but when I used it on Win98 it always just worked.
Another thing about zip folders is that the "file preview" feature, where it shows a snap of an image or video for large icons, doesn't work in a zip folder. It'll only show the default icon for that file type.
It is still engrained in me to download WinRAR as one of the first steps after reinstalling windows, even though i don't really need to anymore. Chrome, WinRAR, Cinebench, graphics driver, VLC Steam and Battlenet while doing initial windows updates are how i setup a fresh OS.
My favorite feature of Windows 11 is the native rar and 7z format, meaning I don't have to other installing any zip software. My favorite feature of Windows 10 was mounting ISOs lol.
ISO mounting has been available since Windows 8 iirc, but yeah, totally agree on that, didn't like messing around with alcohol 120% or Daemon tools and was greatly surprised when I saw ISO support being added
@@ArchiWorldRuS a few things. But not as many as one can do today. I was just starting out then so I was pretty busy just learning how stuff worked. We could mount ISOs but we also had to mount any other media we wanted to read too. Which for me coming from the Microsoft world was a bit of a concept to wrap my head around. Things were harder to do back then for sure.
Man, this brings me back to running GameTable and always having to tell my players to actually unzip the program rather than just running it in the zip folder. "Why aren't the icons working?" "Unzip the folder." "But why should that matter?" *Sigh*
Bro's teaching people to get ready for emulators. I'm glad mechassault+DLC works on CXBX Reloaded which also runs on DX9 instead of Xemu's OpenGL 4.0 which I don't have. That's right, CXBX is a better Mechassault alternative!
I was bored one day during the pandemic an built a gzip decoder in filemaker, there's something satisfying about seeing the process in action ... slowly.
I wish we would use other compressed formats more, sometimes zip files are not able to get as much compression as some other algorithms but for compatibility I have to use them instead. That and some other algorithms are really fast which can be better for some tasks.
@@linuxization4205 Yeah that is a sad story. but its not like the XZ problem is unique to open source... it's unique that someone was able to find it though. See this level of patient supply chain attack (or some variant) is possible against proprietary software... just with different execution. Best thing we the community can do is to offer to help those thanklessly maintaining things by asking what they need. And I point a computer at their crypto addresses when I find them and mine for them... I'm poor so I cannot pay them but I can let my laptop mine them monero when I have access to free power (solar that someone I know has to curtail because they have more than they're allowed to under the new rules... so they just put a heater outside or let me put my computers there and run them full power.)
@@overbored1337 Modern CPUs are crazy fast, fast enough that a lot of algorithms are able to be executed way faster than even super fast SSDs can keep up. There are also algorithms that are better for multiple core CPUs. Personally, I want to see more compression if possible and try to front-load the work so that the compressor does most of the work if possible (I don't do much algorithm design). Reason is that we typically only compress once but we might decompress lots of times. From what I gather it is mostly because zip is the default in windows and is named zip. It can use several algorithms, but among those is the ancient DEFLATE and we have much more modern algorithms these days.
@@asificam1 the point is that zip is able be efficient on a vast amount of different devices, making it a good reason for a standard. And anyone is free to use other formats that compress better as they see fit, but that doesnt mean that it should be a new standard. Besides, more and more fileformats are getting compressed internally, so soon it wont matter and zip will just be a container
Another good reason to use 7zip is that windows only supports .zip, while 7zip can deal with it's own files (7z), rar and many more, which you will encounter over the internet depending on what you're doing.
If memory serves me correctly, back in the day a lot of webhosts limited what file types could be hosted on their servers (I remember .exe files being commonly restricted), so basically everyone used .zip files even if they were only storing one file and didn't need compression.
Pro tip if you’re on Windows 11: Shift+right click opens the older windows 10 menu on a file instead of the simplified new one, which lets you get to 7zip or winrar extraction options faster.
Those archive containers also has a benefits of detecting and preventing corrupted downloads and make sure the data downloaded is intact for those without a verification certificate for executables. Though it should never happen these days but not all networks around the world are still stable and there's potentials of downloads corrupt happen without you knowing with some file formats. always prefer download stuffs are archived instead of bare raw data.
2:52 Wow Linus or whoever wrote the script showing their age by using an archaic method. You've been able to type %blah% into the search bar since Windows 7 and probably Vista.
You only need to use the run prompt if you are on Vista or earlier. From Window 7, onward, you can type %temp% or %appdata% right into the address bar in windows explorer.
"Zip Folders" shipped with the Win95 and Win98 Plus Pack since the first release of Win95... with about 1/2 the PCs we got in our office back in the day, Windows 95 Plus Pack was included with the PC.
Pismo File Mount is another way to have a compressed file seen in read and write as if it is a folder and also supports encryption .. both compression and encryption are done on the fly.
I remember in Skype there was a message that when something like "Folder sharing is not possible yet but will be implemented at some point" and I don't think they've done it and I'm not checking it the point is Skype were the first ones that thought "Why not just let users download FOLDERS?"
I don’t think he mentioned it, but on the self extracting you can rename them from exe to zip to use them as normal zip files. You can of course rename them again back to exe to access those features.
When browsing a zip file in explorer, you also only have the option of opening files with the default application. You lose access to the "open with" context menu. That's fine if you want to open images with "Photo Viewer" but if you want to open it in gimp to make some edits on the image, you'll have to extract it first.
tf? The process of actually getting the file to the program is surely the same no matter what the program is. So why cut off access to the other programs?
Can we get a follow-up video on how file compression & decompression works? i.e. how computers automagically make files smaller without destroying data?
It just detects patterns and encodes instructions on how to restore the data, usually by copying data from somewhere else in the data. Modern compression use prediction instead, trying to predict the next bit/byte and encode the error.
I'd say "7zip FTW" but since moving to Linux it turns out all of that stuff is just built into the OS so you don't have to go fetch something just to open a file someone compressed 7zip FTW BTW
As someone who often making shite out of image editor software (let's just say photoshop) the only reason I would unzip the zip file is just to see the thumbnail of an image or video so I don't click one by one to see the correct jpg or png or mp4 files.
with 7zip smallest compress for most files are Archive Format : 7z Compression Level 9 - Ultra Compression Method LZMA2 Dictionary Size : 1536 MB Word Size : 273 Solid Block Size : Solid Number of CPU Threads : 2 this requires more then 16 gb ram as you wil see in memory usage for compression note increasing the threads benefits in speed and in most instances the file size end result will be the same as the lower threads but there are cases were 2 threads still result in a smaller archive but it is a margin of a few kb's for winrar Archive Format : RAR Compression Method : Best Dictionary Size : 128 MB then in archiving options "Create Solid Archive" this is much lighter compression then 7 zip and yes it wil be bigger then 7z but often smaller then badly compressed 7z/winrar archives
The fact that Windows treats Zip files like compressed directories has contributed to many people today not knowing how to deal with other archive types, like Rar and 7zip. Because they never have to manually extract Zip files, other than double-clicking into them and then copying the files out, they're often unaware how to extract other types of archives that Windows doesn't natively support. Which leads me to a question: Why is Microsoft so hesitant to add support for file formats that they didn't invent?
We should switch to file containers like the ones from cryptomator or veracrypt as they can be mounted as a new writable drive that all programs can work directly from
The way it’s handled is confusing. Once I spent half an hour trying to help my cousin run a software that would always fail to root his phone, until I noticed that the folder he had that software in… was a zip. Extract everything on the desktop, boom done first try.
Guess WarThunder is the right sponsor for this video. No one else is better in UNZIPPING classified military documents. Thanks for the quality content tho
tldr: if you open one thing in a zip, it will unzip only that one thing. But that one thing might need the rest of the things and if you just clicked on one thing the rest of the things stayed in the zip. This is okay for images, videos etc but not okay for executables that expect the rest of the files to be next to it.
You know a lot more about computers than I do, but I feel like when you compress and zip a file. It keeps all of the hidden privileges, and things that go along with what's in there. So when I copy something as a backup, If it's large, I usually zip it first
I'm having a hard time thinking of a type of "text document" that would contain a reference to an image file that Windows could not open from a .zip folder. I believe Word and Adobe Acrobat documents contain the embedded image within the document, so that should be fine. HTML files would just show a broken image if it were missing. Plain text and Rich text documents don't support embedded images.
Microsoft should add the functionality to the filesystem so that file.zip is treated as an actual valid folder. Remember you can compress folders but that ability doesn't automatically treat zip files as simple compressed folders. It should. In other words, treat the zip file as if it was a folder with an attribute set to compressed.
Speaking of which, did you know that modern Microsoft Office files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) are basically just zipped folders? If you rename the file to a .zip extension, you can access many of the individual elements.
Back in 1989 when ZIP was first invented, being able to compress files was a ***VERY*** big deal. At 2,400 bits-per-second every single byte mattered! (Yes, I said BITS - not kilobits or megabits! Downloading was insanely slow back then!)
In the document example, if the images were embedded in the document file, the image files wouldn't be located externally from the document file, but included within the document file. I believe you meant "linked' to the document file. /nitpick
Funny thing is that ZIP is a very antiquated low-quality compression format. Yet for some reason it has become the standard, even though there are significantly better formats.
@@overbored1337 The zip compression format is one of the slowest to compress and decompress from all modern compression formats. There are several modern compression formats that compress measurably better and are literally _tens of times_ faster to compress and decompress.
@@DjVortex-w But most of them uses vast amount of memory, while zip is working with kilobytes, making it very hardware independent. Sure, there are probably better not so known alternatives, but its generally the fastest and less hardware dependent of all the major algorithms.
@@overbored1337 Clearly you haven't looked up any benchmarks. zip is an extremely old compression format and performs poorly both in terms of compression ratio and speed. Modern compression algorithms like zstd and lz4 compress better while doing both compression and decompression several times faster. (There's a reason why eg. squashfs, a compressed filesystem, uses zstd as its compression format, because it's so fast to compress and decompress.)
![[RANT] The DUMBEST Thing About USB](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/gShRBsahzXg/mqdefault.jpg)
![[RANT] The DUMBEST Thing About USB](/img/tr.png)
are you sure this video wasn't made in 2017
I finally paid for winrar two years ago. Felt weird.
why, 7zip works the exact same
Good job. If I wasn’t so lazy I’d do the same.
@@theshedproductions. because software developers have bills...
@@plankera LGR motivated me when he did 😂
7-Zip was right there
Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer invented the zip feature to Windows Explorer. He sold it as a shareware program when Microsoft contacted him to buy it. The Microsoft person that contacted him was unaware that he worked under Dave Custler's Windows NT dev team. I believe they came to an agreement. Dave also created task manager as a side project.
dave plumber also has his own active youtube, too, for anyone who wants to hear more from the guy himself!!!
@@gonderage his channel is awesome! And also it's Dave Plummer, not plumber like the people who fix the pipes in bathrooms lol
He also built the formatting tools in windows
And task manager!
Hehe, that’s one of my favorite stories of his. He’s active on Twitter and posts a lot of his stories!
here is a mindblower tip for designers and everyone else. if you ever receive a pptx file and you want to extract all pictures from it for your more prettier presentation in InDesign or whatever - replace .pptx extension with .zip... extract and voilà
Yeah, I do screen recordings and presentation recordings in PowerPoint and then just pull the footage out. Better than exporting it which on junk work laptops takes forever!!
Allot of programs uses standard zip formats to compress their saved files. They name them with their extension to let you distinguish them from other zip files in your downloads etc. Many actually list the fact they are zip files in their built in docs somewhere. Some of these files even auto open in zip utilities like 7 zip which can detect some zip file formats regardless of the ext used. Try it out sometime change the ext on a zip file and double click it with 7 zip as your default zip program.
Almost all zip utils will open a file as a zip file by opening it from with in the program it self when you explicitly tell it to by putting in *.* then loading the file. The program simply looks at the files header info see what type of file it is and pens it accordingly.
If you want to do some goofy stuff open up a dll in a hex editor and change the file header to make a zip util think it is a zip file. Unlike renaming a ext causing the program to just kick and error out it will try it's best to unzip it LOL
You should be able extract any XML office document e.g. docx, pptx, xlsx
that's neat
@@aarontrevellick8867 You can even circunvent password protected excel sheets editing a file inside. I have done it before.
One of the first things I do after installing Windows and Firefox is installing 7-Zip and making it the default program for all formats it supports.
bake firefox and 7-zip directly into the windows installer and save 1 minute of install/download time 😂
@@marcosolo6491 you can apparently disable it but most people won't so i leave mine on as well
JESUS IS COMING VERY SOON🔥🔥🔥 TURN AWAY YOUR SINS AND REPENT TODAY🤗🤗🤗
@@kuromiLayfe or just run a script to download and install them 😏
@@johndrippergaming What if your internet doesn't work yet >_
Linus windows wallpaper never fails to make me laugh
JESUS IS COMING VERY SOON🔥🔥🔥 TURN AWAY YOUR SINS AND REPENT TODAY🤗🤗🤗
I think it's creepy, especialy him peering in through my windows as I'm unzipping.
There's also an audio responsive version on wallpaper engine and it's wonderful
docx is a zip, too. if you rename the extension, you'll be able to open it and view all the "guts" inside 🙂
You'd be surprised just how many file extensions are literally just a rebranded zip file...
Is this video the applicable to Mac?
All the Office files ending in x. And like the first reply said a decent amount of file types work that way.
And jar files from java applications.
@@SuprousOxide "Java ARchive" ;)
I think Dave Plummer (Dave's Garage) did a video discussing implementing this function within the shell
I was going say somrthing about Dave as well!
JESUS IS COMING VERY SOON🔥🔥🔥 TURN AWAY YOUR SINS AND REPENT TODAY🤗🤗🤗
@@JesusPlsSaveMeI thought he was coming with the eclipse? I'm starting to think he's not going to come 😢
I'm actually surprised you guys didn't cover "zip bombs" or "Zipper bombs". Where people upload rarfiles that are "what you were hoping to download" only to find that after a few seconds when you uncompress it, your entire pc crashs and whatever disk you unzipped too is now permanently locked because the person who made the zip filled it and compressed it with more data than your HDD or ssd could handle.
Now I know this has been fixed depending on your version of windows.
But that's just it, it depends on your version of windows. Afaik this still works on everything from OG windows to windows 10.
There are compressed formats like dwarfs that let you mount them as filesystems so you can access all data without the need for decompressing single files out of the compressed one. It runs the decompression at runtime meaning you can run a whole game directly from a .dwarfs file.
This is how Mac handles all compressed filetypes.
@@kuromiLayfewhat? My mac just unzip it for me and delete the zip right after downloading. I thought it would be a good idea mounting it if it's not a big heavily compressed file
@@kuromiLayfe not really, mainly .dmg (disk image) files and most of those are read only, though some allow read/write. zip and other compressed files on mac can't even be viewed in finder until you unzip them
I still haven't purchased a copy of WinRAR
😂
dw no one has
WinRAR is extremly Bad and slow, 7zip is Just plain better. But, also i did usr WinRAR for years, today its Just bloat Level Software. 😂
boughtwinrar is a subreddit - buy a copy and put yourself in the Hall of Fame as well :D
After 20 years, I'm still waiting for my 60 day trial to end.
People who never had to span a zip file across a stack of floppy disks ... will never know the struggle.
Thank god for arj and then later rar
I’m a college professor, and I’m shocked at how many students today don’t understand what a zip folder is or what to do with it.
A zip file isn't a folder, it is an archive. It is one file that consists of one or more other files and directories.
Do they have computers? because most people today access internet through smartphones and don't deal with files much.
@@1pcfred But on the other hand, uncompressed ZIP does not differ that much from virtual HDD (aka VHD file)
In fact Java uses zip for its executable and resource files, JARs. By default it have tools to treat zipped file like a folder.
What subject? I mean if it's humanities (or girl-STEM like biology) I wouldn't be surprised if the comprehension was low ten years ago too.
@@arivaldarivald3212 virtual HDD (aka VHD file)? I'm going to have to download some RAM off the Internet to grok what that's all about.
Of note, is that Microsoft Office documents these days are ZIP files, with their embedded elements like graphics etc. being represented by separate files within the ZIP, and XML files tying it all together. This is soooo much nicer than the old way of doing things which involved OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) formats which basically involved serialising objects to disk from memory. It's one of the reasons why Outlook PST and MSG files are only fully supported by Outlook on Windows, and why Microsoft desperately wants to get away from them.
As someone who has a large databank of personal files of various formats, it makes sense to compress all that stuff with ZIP/RAR to the highest available level. Talking about data you just store and don't access so often. Part of my databank are programs, that I never want to miss. And you can make them so much smaller by compressing - and many of them just install out of the RAR folder fine.
Where it also pays off big time, is Photoshop files. Highly depending on the contents, some Photoshop files can be 90% smaller when compressed. When colorful high-res photos are part of those PSDs, expect less compression, but when it's a lot about forms and layers, much of that can be compressed.
7z compression is much better than zip and rar, at least i's usually smaller file sizes.
Zips have their advantages but it's worth knowing that windows has compressed folders. I'm not sure what the compression level is like though. Useful if you want to save space but not have the drawbacks that come with working with archive formats. Personally though, I just tend to buy bigger hard-drives.
i first used 7zip to compress files, just cuz it saved slightly more space. but the whole data recovery features winrar has makes it way better in the long run, so i used it for everything now
* _7-Zip crew have entered the chat_ *
they are shilling hard lol, but their 1-2% better compression does not matter when winrar has better file recovery options, perfect for long term storage.
a perfect example was when i downloaded a rar file on a torrent and it got stuck on 97%. i simply used the rebuild feature and the files became 100% despite not me downloading everything
7z is much slower
@@overbored1337 By the time you have opened it and got what you need to do doned, I beg to differ!
I adore the 7z ultimate compression. I shrank 140 GB of dds texturs to just under 24 GB. It took forever to compress tho. But decompression is actually hardware accelerated now. @@overbored1337
Ain't no way i'm witnessing brand loyalty debates between Winrar and 7Zip right now.
7-zip people, please... Is faster than WinRar, Free and opensource...
I thought everyone knew about 7-zip. I guess not.
nanazip if you absolutely positively cannot stand clicking on "show more options" in Windows 11. Also open source (based on 7-zip).
Unfortunately, WinRar CAN do something to files compressed using it that make them not decompressible with 7-zip. It's rare to run into it, but something to be aware of. Also, no, it's not that it's passworded.
As something of an ancient games enjoyer, I occasionally run into ancient copies of games compressed with WinRar that just error out when you try to decompress them with 7-zip, but WinRar can still handle them fine.
And has an awful ui..
I have tried both and decided to stick with WinRAR. It has features that I use that 7zip does not have.
Phil Katz. There’s a sad story. He’s the PK of PKZIP, inventor of Zip format.
Yep. Rip
Nice to see Linus returning to Techquickie.
After long time, a real techquickie showed up
A zip doesn't have to be compressed.
You can just have it act as a storage wrapper for all files.
What's the difference from a regular folder?
@@d.sadster5684 you can send it as a file to people
I payed for WinRAR/RAR!
I am honest and appreciate the work that went into making such a useful set of features.
I'm actually really happy with this video. As someone who used WinRar from pretty much day 1, I recently got surprised by the fact I can just cut and paste files from some zip files without needing to extract.
In some cases that kind of direct approach was really handy but I was confused why some Zips didn't do that the same way.
1:46 Oh so that only got added later? Yeah okay I got into winrar in XP days so figures that I never knew this I guess
Yeah, Zip Folders features wasn't available in Windows 98 or Windows 2000; it could be added by installing Microsoft Plus! product. Later, Windows XP had it out of the box.
_Not my proudest file type._
touch grass bro
@@milky_dromedasiroon
*unzips*
@@caesarringstrom450 you sirunom
@@caesarringstrom450 Hol' up.
ty for still making these
Seeing the LZMA algorithm selected made me smile ngl
No mention of PKZIP. I regret that I only have one head to shake in disappointment
Macs just unload the contents into a folder when you open the zip file. It’s like, “Look, we know these files will be extracted anyway, so let’s skip that preview step completely.” I find that convenient.
Interesting breakdown of the zip file process. Never knew Windows automatically unzips the exe files to a temporary folder.
Windows's built in zip/rar support is much appreciated, but also has a lot to improve on.
Most of the time it's slow as hell, taking about twice as much time, if not more, than WinRAR.
If that wasn't enough it also throws out corruption errors fairly often even if the files are perfectly fine and extracting with winrar instead works perfectly fine
Kinda reminds me how I had Worms Armagedon on my school's server without our IT guy being able to find it, because we had .bat file on usb that was unpacking the game for us to play and deleting the unpacked game when we were done. All done on server itself, since it was an actual PC, unlike our workstations that struggled to run WinXP in less than 5 minutes. (From loading OS screen to actually usable OS desktop).
There's a 7zip plugin for Total Commander, which brings the functionality to be able to access the contents of 7z files without the actual program within Total Commander. 🙂
But installing the actual 7zip also can be handy, because it adds an option to open files like if those were archives without modifying the file extension.
WinRAR has been great using it for encryption and best compression.
Fun fact, Google Driver's copyright scanner won't work on encrypted files, and there's an easy "store" option for no compression.
Well I'd kinda hope the contents of an encrypted file couldn't be read without the key! 😜
actually 7z has slight better compression in most cases, but winrar has better file recovery options, like your file can suffer a ton of bitrot or damage and the data can be rebuilt, on 7zip the whole thing is lost
Winrar is also much faster
A zip file is like a file system and can be written to by editing the end of central directory. So a program can load all files needed without extracting the entire zip. Such a function can be done on linux with a FUSE driver
good thing about 7zip is that it doesnt have the 255 character limit
Limit for what? And isn't the 255 char limit was from windows 3.1 era of computing? Why is that still a thing today?
@@Napoleonic_S backwards compatibility
@@Napoleonic_S No, Windows 3.1 didn't handle long filename at all, this support was added in Windows 95 only. Windows file handling APIs have a limit to a name of a file, its absolute path must not exceed 260 characters (MAX_PATH). Modern systems support paths longer than this limit, yet it requires the programmer to handle it.
I feel that one aspect that could've been mentioned (but I understand why they didn't) is the fact that compressing data is essentially finding repetitions in the data and creating substitutions. After that it's just different and more clever ways of finding such instances.
This does, however, raise the question on how to fundamentally handle it; do you take each file and compress each individually, or do you take *all* the data and compress it all at once.
The first approach; you can decompress each file individually, but you leave some efficiency on the table
The second approach; you can find a repetition instance with data that doesn't belong to a single file making it more efficient, but you need to decompress all the files even if you only open a single one (though that can be done in the background)
You can also concatenate some files up to a certain block size, then compress that so it limits the amount of time and memory required
@@shanent5793 I thought about mentioning it last night when I posted first and decided against it because, for the user experience, it's the same as the 'just compress everything' option, but you're absolutely right and it's a fundamentally different way of treating the compression job.
That'll teach me to post late night comments :P
Beardless linus really takes me back man
A feature of WinRAR that I don't know if anyone ever noticed before was that it would extract DLL's when you double click to run an executable from inside of an archive, of any format that it could handle. I haven't used it in about two decades, so I don't know if it extracted all DLL's in the same folder or if it scanned the .exe file to look for imports, but when I used it on Win98 it always just worked.
Another thing about zip folders is that the "file preview" feature, where it shows a snap of an image or video for large icons, doesn't work in a zip folder. It'll only show the default icon for that file type.
I like how modern OSes make unzipping easy. On Linux Mint it's now built-in to the system, and unzips all 7 types, without having to install 7-zip :)
It is still engrained in me to download WinRAR as one of the first steps after reinstalling windows, even though i don't really need to anymore. Chrome, WinRAR, Cinebench, graphics driver, VLC Steam and Battlenet while doing initial windows updates are how i setup a fresh OS.
And of course discord
Total Commander to rule them all.
My favorite feature of Windows 11 is the native rar and 7z format, meaning I don't have to other installing any zip software. My favorite feature of Windows 10 was mounting ISOs lol.
ISO mounting has been available since Windows 8 iirc, but yeah, totally agree on that, didn't like messing around with alcohol 120% or Daemon tools and was greatly surprised when I saw ISO support being added
@@ArchiWorldRuS TIL! I skipped Windows 8 lol
@@ArchiWorldRuS I could mount an ISO in Linux in 1995
@@1pcfred could you do anything else on Linux in 1995 tho?
@@ArchiWorldRuS a few things. But not as many as one can do today. I was just starting out then so I was pretty busy just learning how stuff worked. We could mount ISOs but we also had to mount any other media we wanted to read too. Which for me coming from the Microsoft world was a bit of a concept to wrap my head around. Things were harder to do back then for sure.
Man, this brings me back to running GameTable and always having to tell my players to actually unzip the program rather than just running it in the zip folder. "Why aren't the icons working?" "Unzip the folder." "But why should that matter?" *Sigh*
Bro's teaching people to get ready for emulators. I'm glad mechassault+DLC works on CXBX Reloaded which also runs on DX9 instead of Xemu's OpenGL 4.0 which I don't have. That's right, CXBX is a better Mechassault alternative!
Either this video is from 5 years ago or Linus's voice cracking returned with his beard getting lost
I was bored one day during the pandemic an built a gzip decoder in filemaker, there's something satisfying about seeing the process in action ... slowly.
I wish we would use other compressed formats more, sometimes zip files are not able to get as much compression as some other algorithms but for compatibility I have to use them instead. That and some other algorithms are really fast which can be better for some tasks.
At least Gzip and tar are present. (excluding xz, because you know why)
@@linuxization4205 Yeah that is a sad story. but its not like the XZ problem is unique to open source... it's unique that someone was able to find it though. See this level of patient supply chain attack (or some variant) is possible against proprietary software... just with different execution. Best thing we the community can do is to offer to help those thanklessly maintaining things by asking what they need. And I point a computer at their crypto addresses when I find them and mine for them... I'm poor so I cannot pay them but I can let my laptop mine them monero when I have access to free power (solar that someone I know has to curtail because they have more than they're allowed to under the new rules... so they just put a heater outside or let me put my computers there and run them full power.)
Thats because zip requires minimal amount of resources and is super fast
@@overbored1337 Modern CPUs are crazy fast, fast enough that a lot of algorithms are able to be executed way faster than even super fast SSDs can keep up. There are also algorithms that are better for multiple core CPUs. Personally, I want to see more compression if possible and try to front-load the work so that the compressor does most of the work if possible (I don't do much algorithm design). Reason is that we typically only compress once but we might decompress lots of times.
From what I gather it is mostly because zip is the default in windows and is named zip. It can use several algorithms, but among those is the ancient DEFLATE and we have much more modern algorithms these days.
@@asificam1 the point is that zip is able be efficient on a vast amount of different devices, making it a good reason for a standard. And anyone is free to use other formats that compress better as they see fit, but that doesnt mean that it should be a new standard.
Besides, more and more fileformats are getting compressed internally, so soon it wont matter and zip will just be a container
These videos are the best, we know these things, we use them almost on a daily basis, but we don't appreciate the technical nuances. Thanks Linus
Another good reason to use 7zip is that windows only supports .zip, while 7zip can deal with it's own files (7z), rar and many more, which you will encounter over the internet depending on what you're doing.
If memory serves me correctly, back in the day a lot of webhosts limited what file types could be hosted on their servers (I remember .exe files being commonly restricted), so basically everyone used .zip files even if they were only storing one file and didn't need compression.
Pro tip if you’re on Windows 11: Shift+right click opens the older windows 10 menu on a file instead of the simplified new one, which lets you get to 7zip or winrar extraction options faster.
Those archive containers also has a benefits of detecting and preventing corrupted downloads and make sure the data downloaded is intact for those without a verification certificate for executables. Though it should never happen these days but not all networks around the world are still stable and there's potentials of downloads corrupt happen without you knowing with some file formats. always prefer download stuffs are archived instead of bare raw data.
Now a follow up with all the compression algorithms in those programms and ultimately NNCP from non other than Fabrice Bellard, would be immaculate
2:52 Wow Linus or whoever wrote the script showing their age by using an archaic method. You've been able to type %blah% into the search bar since Windows 7 and probably Vista.
Never thought to ask this question, but stayed for the education and wonderful Linus hosting the video.
You only need to use the run prompt if you are on Vista or earlier. From Window 7, onward, you can type %temp% or %appdata% right into the address bar in windows explorer.
"Zip Folders" shipped with the Win95 and Win98 Plus Pack since the first release of Win95... with about 1/2 the PCs we got in our office back in the day, Windows 95 Plus Pack was included with the PC.
WinRAR + Aladdin theme = 🥰🥰
Pismo File Mount is another way to have a compressed file seen in read and write as if it is a folder and also supports encryption .. both compression and encryption are done on the fly.
I remember in Skype there was a message that when something like "Folder sharing is not possible yet but will be implemented at some point" and I don't think they've done it and I'm not checking it the point is Skype were the first ones that thought "Why not just let users download FOLDERS?"
I don’t think he mentioned it, but on the self extracting you can rename them from exe to zip to use them as normal zip files. You can of course rename them again back to exe to access those features.
When browsing a zip file in explorer, you also only have the option of opening files with the default application. You lose access to the "open with" context menu.
That's fine if you want to open images with "Photo Viewer" but if you want to open it in gimp to make some edits on the image, you'll have to extract it first.
tf? The process of actually getting the file to the program is surely the same no matter what the program is. So why cut off access to the other programs?
Can we get a follow-up video on how file compression & decompression works? i.e. how computers automagically make files smaller without destroying data?
It just detects patterns and encodes instructions on how to restore the data, usually by copying data from somewhere else in the data.
Modern compression use prediction instead, trying to predict the next bit/byte and encode the error.
I'd say "7zip FTW" but since moving to Linux it turns out all of that stuff is just built into the OS so you don't have to go fetch something just to open a file someone compressed
7zip FTW BTW
winrar ftw, the file recovery features are superior in every way
Winrar is also much faster than 7z
As someone who often making shite out of image editor software (let's just say photoshop) the only reason I would unzip the zip file is just to see the thumbnail of an image or video so I don't click one by one to see the correct jpg or png or mp4 files.
And now I'm thinking of that old RocketJump video about someone buying a WinRar license.
with 7zip smallest compress for most files are
Archive Format : 7z
Compression Level 9 - Ultra
Compression Method LZMA2
Dictionary Size : 1536 MB
Word Size : 273
Solid Block Size : Solid
Number of CPU Threads : 2
this requires more then 16 gb ram as you wil see in memory usage for compression
note increasing the threads benefits in speed and in most instances the file size end result will be the same as the lower threads but there are cases were 2 threads still result in a smaller archive but it is a margin of a few kb's
for winrar
Archive Format : RAR
Compression Method : Best
Dictionary Size : 128 MB
then in archiving options "Create Solid Archive"
this is much lighter compression then 7 zip and yes it wil be bigger then 7z but often smaller then badly compressed 7z/winrar archives
Linus without a beard on this channel. Feels like 2015 again
The fact that Windows treats Zip files like compressed directories has contributed to many people today not knowing how to deal with other archive types, like Rar and 7zip. Because they never have to manually extract Zip files, other than double-clicking into them and then copying the files out, they're often unaware how to extract other types of archives that Windows doesn't natively support.
Which leads me to a question: Why is Microsoft so hesitant to add support for file formats that they didn't invent?
We should switch to file containers like the ones from cryptomator or veracrypt as they can be mounted as a new writable drive that all programs can work directly from
I thought you were Linus Tech Tips for a sec lol. Great video this is helpful!
The way it’s handled is confusing. Once I spent half an hour trying to help my cousin run a software that would always fail to root his phone, until I noticed that the folder he had that software in… was a zip. Extract everything on the desktop, boom done first try.
1:30 and now they still r cause even if they made w11 support other formats, it is still like 8 times slower than 7z or winrar
Finally a homework, that actually contains homeworks
Guess WarThunder is the right sponsor for this video. No one else is better in UNZIPPING classified military documents.
Thanks for the quality content tho
Man idk about the files but once I forgot to unzip my pants before peeing, I don't wanna talk about it, Guess it's the same way with files
Nah 💀
tldr: if you open one thing in a zip, it will unzip only that one thing. But that one thing might need the rest of the things and if you just clicked on one thing the rest of the things stayed in the zip. This is okay for images, videos etc but not okay for executables that expect the rest of the files to be next to it.
Will love to know what happens when you mount a zip file and ISO file in windows as a folder for the next video.
You know a lot more about computers than I do, but I feel like when you compress and zip a file. It keeps all of the hidden privileges, and things that go along with what's in there. So when I copy something as a backup,
If it's large, I usually zip it first
I'm having a hard time thinking of a type of "text document" that would contain a reference to an image file that Windows could not open from a .zip folder. I believe Word and Adobe Acrobat documents contain the embedded image within the document, so that should be fine. HTML files would just show a broken image if it were missing. Plain text and Rich text documents don't support embedded images.
7-zip is just way too good, idk what I’d do without it
Microsoft should add the functionality to the filesystem so that file.zip is treated as an actual valid folder. Remember you can compress folders but that ability doesn't automatically treat zip files as simple compressed folders. It should. In other words, treat the zip file as if it was a folder with an attribute set to compressed.
Thanks Dave!😊
one thing you should have mentioned is that some .zip files need 7zip/winrar to properly extract it instead of windows explorer.
Speaking of which, did you know that modern Microsoft Office files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) are basically just zipped folders? If you rename the file to a .zip extension, you can access many of the individual elements.
wow welcome back to as fast as possible lins....
Back in 1989 when ZIP was first invented, being able to compress files was a ***VERY*** big deal. At 2,400 bits-per-second every single byte mattered! (Yes, I said BITS - not kilobits or megabits! Downloading was insanely slow back then!)
You need to do a video with Daves Garage. He wrote the ZIP extension in windows, task manager, and a few other things.
I'm shocked that this is still a valid topic
Linus really needed to record this after that one wan show rant
Linus back on techquickie, unexpected
In the document example, if the images were embedded in the document file, the image files wouldn't be located externally from the document file, but included within the document file. I believe you meant "linked' to the document file. /nitpick
Tech quickie can be such an useful tool for computer science lessons
Fun fact, you can open a lot of compiled files like a .jar, .iso etc, with any Zip explorer!
Funny thing is that ZIP is a very antiquated low-quality compression format. Yet for some reason it has become the standard, even though there are significantly better formats.
Because its super fast and requires minimal amount of resources
@@overbored1337
The zip compression format is one of the slowest to compress and decompress from all modern compression formats. There are several modern compression formats that compress measurably better and are literally _tens of times_ faster to compress and decompress.
@@DjVortex-w But most of them uses vast amount of memory, while zip is working with kilobytes, making it very hardware independent. Sure, there are probably better not so known alternatives, but its generally the fastest and less hardware dependent of all the major algorithms.
@@overbored1337
Clearly you haven't looked up any benchmarks.
zip is an extremely old compression format and performs poorly both in terms of compression ratio and speed. Modern compression algorithms like zstd and lz4 compress better while doing both compression and decompression several times faster. (There's a reason why eg. squashfs, a compressed filesystem, uses zstd as its compression format, because it's so fast to compress and decompress.)
@@DjVortex-w I know both these algorithms, but they use more memory afaik while zip uses kilobytes
Can you guys go over different compression algorithms? Especially the ones like in 7-zip?
He very generously asks if you like or dislike ❤
This Linus guy seems like a decent host, perhaps have him in some more content over that awful Plouff guy
Do you really have to unzip before peeing, no... But! It is a lot more pleasant!