[vorbis] How to make Vorbis popular

[Craig Dickson]

fungus wrote:

> The ARJ and RAR formats were better than zip and
> also free but they never knocked zip off the throne.

I was active in the modem BBS world when arj came out. I didn't see any
particular reason to use it. What was better about it? The files it
produced were of roughly comparable size (sometimes a bit smaller,
sometimes not), and it wasn't much, if any, faster. Here is a relatively
recent test of several competing archivers:

    http://www.vico1.com/zip.html

Note that arj and pkzip (and rar) are nearly equal in both speed and
compressed size. In fact, in this test, only two archivers produce
significantly smaller files than pkzip, and one of those (X1) is very
slow. This leaves only one, jar32, that produces smaller files without a
nasty performance penalty. And the difference in size between pkzip and
jar32 is much less dramatic than between arc and pkzip. Furthermore,
according to the developer of jar32, the format is only supported on
DOS/Windows (it is not related to the Java .jar format, btw), making it
an unsuitable format for files that may be useful on other platforms. So
it's no surprise that the .zip format is still popular; nothing has
really improved on it enough to matter. (There are also .tar.gz and
.tar.bz2, of course, but those result from compressing an archive rather
than archiving compressed files, and so are somewhat harder to work with
if you want to add/remove individual files. They're also more of a Unix
thing, although of course you can get the necessary tools for Win32 if
you want.)

Also notice that part of the reason that .arc died so swiftly was
precisely the lawsuit threats made by the arc developers against pkarc.
This annoyed people and made them want not to use arc. If Fraunhofer/
Thomson start suing people about MP3, it could have a similar effect on
the MP3 audience.

Craig

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