Supported compression types in .zip files

[Andy Stevenson]

We were recently testing different compression types in WinZip 11, and discovered that BC3 does not support bzip2 or PPMd.

Information on PPMd is at this URL:
http://www.winzip.com/comp_info.htm

I saw a bzip2 post in the BC2 support forums, so I know that's on your list somewhere.

Curious if this is on your roadmap. We will switch back to the
BC3-supported compression type for our zip files, but sometime it would be nice to use PPMd, as it produces smaller files.

I couldn't find a list of supported compression types for .zip files in your preliminary user manual -- perhaps it would make sense to add it?

It was helpful that the error reported by BC3 said unsupported compression type -- that way we immediately knew what the issue was.

Thanks!

[Chris]

Hi Andy,

We use a third party library for archive file support, and it doesn't have support for many of the newer archive formats. Adding support for some of the newer archive formats is on our developer's todo list, although I don't think we have a specific date for this right now.

The library used in BC is TurboPower Abbrevia (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tpabbrevia/). It supports PKZIP 4, CAB, Tar, and Gzip. We don't support bzip, bzip2, 7-zip, zip64, or zip with AES encryption.

[Marjolein Katsma]

The library used in BC is TurboPower Abbrevia (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tpabbrevia/). It supports PKZIP 4, CAB, Tar, and Gzip. We don't support bzip, bzip2, 7-zip, zip64, or zip with AES encryption.

Now that you mention it... some (de)archiving utilities also support ISO disk images (although not a comprssed format, it certainly counts as an "archive" format) - it would be very handy if Cirrus (or Abbrevia) would support this, too. But 7-zip would also be very welcome becaue of the small file sizes it can produce.

[Chris]

Marjolein,

Thanks for the suggestion. Support for ISO images is also on our wish list for the future.

[miki]

Hi Andy,

We use a third party library for archive file support, and it doesn't have support for many of the newer archive formats. Adding support for some of the newer archive formats is on our developer's todo list, although I don't think we have a specific date for this right now.

Hi Chris, nice to see it's on your todo list and I hope you have on the todo list also the RAR format ...

The library used in BC is TurboPower Abbrevia (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tpabbrevia/). It supports PKZIP 4, CAB, Tar, and Gzip. We don't support bzip, bzip2, 7-zip, zip64, or zip with AES encryption.

Abbrevia was a powerfull library, but today is not updated

Last new and release almost 4 years ago:

Date: 2004-03-10 21:04
Summary: Abbrevia 3.05 Beta #6 Released

There are others third party compression library you could be used/tested for version 3?
A new wonderfull Beyond Compare release with an obsolete "zip support" is not good IMO ...

Regards

Miki

[Michael Bulgrien]

I don't keep up with compression libraries...but I do use StuffIt when I want better compression than zip. They have a StuffIt SDK and a well-rounded list of supported file formats:

.arc .bz2 .cab .exe (self-expanding archives) .gz .hqx .lha .lzh
.mime .pf .rar .sea .sit .sitx .tar .tgz .uu .uue .yenc .z .zip

[Michael Bulgrien]

And then there is IZarc. I don't know if it could be integrated into a product like BC,
but it is free and has a much more impressive list of supported file formats:

7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC,
GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI,
PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO

IZarc also supports 256-bit AES encryption

[Michael Bulgrien]

ComponentAce has some compression products for Delphi with positive testimonials. It would probably be an easy transition from Abbrevia...though perhaps not the wide support of file-formats listed above.

[Zoë]

We'll probably use ComponentAce's ZipForge for zip support. I have decent ideas for 7-zip and RAR support. For the time being we'll probably stick with Abbrevia for CAB support. I don't know what we'll move to for tar/gz/bzip2 support yet, and haven't looked into ISO support at all.

We aren't happy about having out-of-date zip support either, but it's very unlikely that we'll update it before v3 is released.