Compression ratios

Hi,
after recently reading somewhere about compression ratios - it says certain types of files can be compressed to a fraction of their original size.
One such file type are bmp (bit mapped images).

My question is do any of the users on this site know of other file types that can be compressed so much?

for anyone out there who plays football manager 2007 - if you wants to back up your game saves (winrar them and they are compressed to a much smaller file).

I use Winrar primarily. What is best compression softare(s)?

P.S
does anyone know how to compress movies on a hard drive?
they take up far too much space.

Thank you.

 

WinRAR is one of the best compression tools out there so just stick with it. And compressing movies can be tricky; simply using WinRAR or WinZip doesn't save much space. I tried it with a 2.5gb DVD file and it "shrunk" it to 2.28gb so you can see it didn't do much. With movies, you have to convert it to a highly compressed format; RealMedia is a high quality format with a high compression ratio. I've seen full movies compressed to about 350mb (or even smaller). Formats designed for use with iPods usually have a high compression ratio, but quality may suffer. Go to AfterDawn.com or VideoHelp.com for more info. Check the MultiMedia section here at MajorGeeks for software that may help you.

 

thank you dlb

 

I read an article a while back comparing compression schemes and 7zip came out the best..and I still use WinRAR. 7Zip has a bit of a following - 1 its high compression 2- it's FREE.

I agree visit Videohelp & read up on compressing video by using Xvid or divx codecs.. Like he stated you do loose quality.


More nfo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_archivers