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But why would compressing two files together be any more complicated than compressing two files individually? The compression algorithm doesn't care what bytestream we feed into it.

amon
– amon

2017-08-16 15:54:15 +00:00
Commented Aug 16, 2017 at 15:54
@amon I don't know the details for WinRAR but most people don't want/need to compress everything as a single stream so I doubt WinRAR defaults to it. Compressing everything together has the potential for better compression, but you lose random access - you have to decompress all the files to extract any file.

Doval
– Doval

2017-08-16 17:18:33 +00:00
Commented Aug 16, 2017 at 17:18
Ahh, ok. I did not know that the algorithm is only looking for patterns in small data parts. I get, that it would require a lot more calculation power to analyse the whole data, but I don't get why I wouldn't be able to extract single files from the compressed archive. What would make it impossible to extract a single file?

jusaca
– jusaca

2017-08-17 10:34:34 +00:00
Commented Aug 17, 2017 at 10:34

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