WinZip WinRAR COMPARISON STUDY

The compression study then led me to study and compare different aspects compression tools like
WinZip 12 and WinRAR 3.70.
Both WinZip and WinRAR are used for compression but there are lot of differences in their
properties. And some of their properties are explained below.

WinZip WinRAR

MULTI OS ONLY FOR WINDOWS WINDOWS,LINUX, Mac,

SUPPORT DOS, OS/2

COMPRESS ZIP RAR, ZIP

FORMATS

METHOD USED Deflate LZ and Prediction by Partial

method(combination of Matching (PPM)
LZ77 and Huffman
coding)

DICTIONARY DEFAULT CAN SET DICTIONARY

SIZE SIZE

PROFILE FOR NOT APPLICABLE CREATE OUR OWN

COMPRESSION PROFILE FOR
COMPRESSION
RAR,ZIP,TAR,
EXTRACTION ZIP, RAR, TAR, JAR, JAR.BZIP2,UUE,Z,
BZIP2, UUE,Z,CAB CAB,ARJ,ACE,LZH,GZIP,7
-ZIP,ISO.
Table no: 1 Differences between WinZip and WinRAR (WinRAR, 2009)

These are some of the difference between WinZip and WinRAR. When I go through different aspects
about WinZip and WinRAR, found that they explain that the compression ratio of WinRAR is
slightly greater than that of WinZip. So for proving that fact, did compressing around fifty to sixty
different size files in default settings of both WinZip and WinRAR and find their respective
compression ratios and compare it. And found that the WinRAR compress a file more than that of
WinZip. So for a deep analysis of the performance of WinZip and WinRAR, try to compress different
format of file like .txt file, .jpg file, .bmp file, .wmv file and .mp3 files; find out their respective rate
of compression, and those results with graph were explained below.
1. TEXT FILE (.txt FILE)
In this section, using WinZip and WinRAR compress different text files of variable size (different
texts were copy and pasted to a notepad and saved and those files were used for compression), and
their result shows that the compression ratio is slightly more for WinRAR than WinZip. The ratio
goes on increasing with the file size.
WinZip WinRAR
ORIGINAL FILE COMPRESSED SIZE COMPRESSED SIZE
SIZE (bytes) (comp ratio %) (comp ratio %)

9211 3835(58.36) 3822(58.50)

13909 4948(64.43) 4896(64.80)

17056 6090(64.29) 6019(64.71)

34080 11623(65.89) 11370(66.64)

47104 15680(66.71) 15056(68.04)

107384 34934(67.47) 33105(69.17)

201831 66215(67.19) 61829(69.36)

Table no: 2 Table for WinZip Vs WinRAR .txt files

These were some of the files sizes and their compression ratio that did for the study, more than fifty
files of different sizes are compressed and determine the compression ratios and compare their
respective ratios of both WinZip and WinRAR, and in almost all cases the WinRAR shows more
compression rate than WinZip.
The following graph plot, file size on X axis and compression ratio on Y axis and the graph shows
that the difference in compression ratio increases with the increase in file size. And also the result
shows that files are compressed more in WinRAR than WinZip, and their respective ratio is going on
increasing with the file size.
 1.1. GRAPH FOR TEXT FILES (.TXT)
75

70

65 WinRAR
WinZip

60

55
9211 13909 17056 34080 47104 107384 201831 Figure no 3:
Graph for WinZip Vs WinRAR .txt files
1.2 RESULT
The result of this comparison study can be conclude that, WinRAR compress a text file more than
that of WinZip.

2 IMAGE (.JPG FILE)

In image compression, when compress different size of images, and their result shows that the
compression for images were slightly more in WinZip than in WinRAR, but the difference is not that
much as in text file compression, even though there are some difference in size for both type of
compression. The compression ratios of these images are very less, so in the graph I plot the original
file size on X axis and compressed file size on Y axis
The below given table explains about different image files of variable size and their respective
compression size for both WinZip and WinRAR.
 WinZip WinRAR
ORIGINAL FILE SIZE COMPRESSED SIZE COMPRESSED SIZE
(bytes) (bytes) (bytes)

1933680 1920083 1925203

2041023 2026138 2028651

2056524 2052688 2056347

2060831 2042155 2044720

2169525 2163704 2166272

2241416 2231371 2234591

2242849 2229066 2233052

Table no: 4 Table for WinZip Vs WinRAR .jpg image file

The below shown graph shows that the WinZip has less number of bytes when compared to
WinRAR, that means the compression is more in WinZip than in WinRAR.
2.1 ORIGINAL FILE SIZE Vs COMPRESSED FILE SIZE (in KBs)
2250 2234.59 2233.05
2231.37 2229.07
2235
2220
2205
2190
2175 2163.7
2160 2166.27
2145
2130
2115
2100
2085 WinZip
2070 2056.35 WinRAR
2052.69
2055 2042.16
2040 2044.72
2026.14
2025 2028.65
2010
1995
1980
1965
1950
1935
1920.08
1920 1925.2
1933.68 2041.02 2056.52 2060.83 2169.53 2241.42 2242.85
 Figure no : Graph for WinZip Vs WinRAR .jpg image files
2.2 RESULT
After compressing different images I found that the compression for images (.JPG) is more for
WinZip than WinRAR. In the above graph; it was not clearly shows that but we can found it the truth
by checking the file size of each compression. Even though it was only few bytes when compared to
the original size, still more than thousand bytes difference were there between the two.

3. IMAGE COMPRESSION (.bmp FILE)

In WinZip, WinRAR compression study, next study was done on .bmp images; for that different
size .bmp images were downloaded from different website and did compression with both WinZip
and WinRAR. In this study, the following table shows that the variable compression ratio for images
of different sizes.
And when comparing their respective ratios shows that the compression ratio is more in WinRAR
compared to WinZip.
6.3.1. GRAPH FOR .bmp IMAGES
Plot X axis image size and Y axis compression ratio

94
84
74
64
54
44 WinZip
34 WinRAR
24
14

0 62 92 2
20 5 22 02 78 0
1 76 3 9 6 01 74
1 26 03 80 0 14 6
6 6 75
0
90 2 55 56 56
7 54 8 4 2
12 55 46 27
4 61 70
Figure no : Graph
for WinZip Vs WinRAR .bmp image files
3.2 RESULT:
After comparing different .bmp images of variable size, the compression rate is more for WinRAR
than WinZip.
 4 Mp3 AND VIDEO
The next study of compression was on video and mp3 files, when I compared different files of both
of different sizes; the compression ratios got in a variable manner, means in some mp3 and video
files WinZip compress more than WinRAR and in some vice versa. So I could not able to conclude
which one is better for these mp3 and video files.
These studies were done on the basis of compression result of few files; but in some cases the result
may vary because of the structure and content of the file. So the above results were written in a
generalised way, which means in some cases it may happen vice versa.
5 DICTIONARIES USED FOR WinZip AND WinRAR
5.1 PPM (prediction by partial matching)
PPM is a type of adaptive statistical compression method based on prediction and context modelling.
It uses the set of older symbols in the data symbols stream that to be compressed to anticipate the
upcoming symbol stream. Normally prediction decreases to symbol ranking; the order prediction by
partial matching is determined by the number of old symbols and it is represented as PPM (n). On the
basis of the context symbols if no prediction could be made, a prediction is tried with n-1 symbols
and these processes is continued until a similar symbol is found or till the end of the context. And on
that particular point fixed prediction is to be made. And the above process is a complementally that to
follow by Dynamic Markov Compression which creates from a zero-order model. In PPM model
much of the optimization is handled on the basis of inputs that were not occurred in the input stream.
The apparent way to deal these by creating a new symbol which activates the escape sequence and
the probability of assigning new symbols is called as zero frequency problems. And in PPM
compression the proper symbol selection is done on the basis of arithmetic coding or even through
some dictionary method. (Witten, 1984)

5.2 DEFLATE METHOD

In deflate method compression is mainly achieved by two steps one is by matching and replacing the
duplicate strings with pointers and the second step is by replacing symbols with a new symbol based
on how often it use. Duplicate string elimination using LZ77 and LZ78 is by when a duplicate series
is found among a compressed block, then inserting a back reference which links to the location of the
previous string that has an identity with the series. And next is by bit reduction is done with Huffman
coding is the second stage of compression which replaces the commonly used symbols with a shorter
symbol and rarely occurring symbols with a longer symbol.