Talk:Solid compression

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[edit] Cab files

I believe that Cabinet (file format) is also Solid, so merits addition, and it's pretty common, as every Windows system has .CAB files on it. Hobart 16:37, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Is tar.gz / tar.bz2 solid?

I think it might be incorrect to say that tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives are solid. If I understand the concept correctly -- and I'm not sure I do -- then it could be said that a tar file is solid. All the individual files have been coalesced into a single block of bytes. Note that it doesn't necessarily mean that the file is compressed! It might be interesting to note that a gzip of a tar file would be solid, but a tar files of a number of gzipped files would NOT be solid. The difference between those two archive sizes might represent the difference between a solid and non-solid archive.

Indeed, but by definition a .tar.gz extension means that the tar step has been applied before the gzip step, so this is a solid archive. A "tar of gzipped files" (which would be pretty unusual) would have the extension .tar. A tar file itself is not solid because it isn't compressed and the individual files can be recovered easily (tar files are just concatenated header-data-header-data-... - there is no overall header or trailer which is required to be there). Richard W.M. Jones 14:20, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] History of solid compression

It would be nice to see some information about the first codec to feature solid compression.

This might have been the RAR format/codec appearing in the early 1990's.

But if you count unix's tar -z (tar compressed by the external compress programm) as a codec, this one should have been first. -- Juergen 89.54.108.20 12:31, 15 October 2006 (UTC)