Template talk:Compression software

Windows Compression utility

I noticed that the compression utility that comes with Windows isn't listed here. Is there a reason? :) Strawberry Island 19:15, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

It's non-notable. Plenty of applications have home-brewed zip support, Windows being one of them. I suppose if someone were to write something on Wikipedia about Windows's Compressed Folders feature we might be able to include it, but it's not a huge omission. Chris Cunningham 07:53, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Archivers are divided into rather arbitrary categories

Open source, proprietary, freeware and command line.

Command-line applications can be any or all of the other three groups, all of which themselves overlap (and the odd application might be in all four categories; it's not impossible). A better division might be proprietary versus free, or GUI versus command line. What's there now is neither informative nor easy to predict, and would be as usefully served as an uncategorized list. 82.163.145.48 (talk) 16:53, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

ffdshow & ProRes 422

Where would ffdshow & ProRes 422 fall in this template? —IncidentFlux ^{[ TalkBack | Contributions ]} 17:36, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Trimming

I've trimmed this down to just software products/implementations. I'm still of the mind that this template is a disaster waiting to happen, and might TFD it, but we'll see how the trimming goes. —Locke Cole • t • c 11:53, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

I think you trimmed it down a bit too much. :-) FFV1, Snow and VP7 are actually software products, too (FFV1 and Snow are included in the libavcodec library, VP7 can be downloaded from the On2 website). Vorbis and Theora are specifications, but their reference software implementations are libvorbis and libtheora, so I re-added them under these names. For the Windows Media items, they're both Microsoft's formats and their own proprietary software implementations.

Generally, there are two advantages of this separation: first, if the table included both implementations and specifications, it would be really huge, second, it would be very confusing, because it would mix two completely different things and most people do not understand the difference between a computer program and a format the program uses (for example, PNG is an image format, and Adobe Photoshop is one of the software products that supports this format). So they would not be able to make head or tail of it. This separation makes it clear. That's why the Software Implementations template is included in articles about software products, while the formats template is included in articles about formats.—J. M. (talk) 05:33, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I nuked Snow because it was a redlink. =) I was aware of libvorbis and libtheora but wasn't sure if they met the "software product" requirement. If there's any more I removed that actually belonged, feel free to re-add. But I noticed a lot of stuff that didn't, so figured it was time to do some cleanup. As an aside: perhaps merging these two templates is a bad idea given how large it would end up being. —Locke Cole • t • c 06:42, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

bzip2, gzip, compress, lzop are not archivers

bzip2, gzip, compress, and lzop are not archivers. They are pure compression only. They should not be listed under "archivers." --Spoon! (talk) 03:10, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

That's right. So do you think a separate category for compression should be added? Or maybe the category could be renamed to "File compression and archivers", since RAR and others fall into both categories... Actually, the template name is "Compression Software Implementations", so does this mean for example tar does not belong there at all, as it does not compress data? (I know it can use gzip etc. for compression, but is it a built-in feature, or does it use external software for that?)—J. M. (talk) 05:03, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

If you split all these, then you possibly need a category split for each type of license reflected in the lists. I was going to add xz to the list. If by convention of gzip, bzip2, compress, lzop being in the list, xz should be too, as its coming into wide use, but last I looked at this, there was the obvious inconsistency noted previously. There's some mingling and overlap between List_of_archive_formats and this list that should be discussed. Leehenderson (talk) 18:29, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

MPEG 2, MPEG 1

I 've seen the implementations for the MPEG 4 ASP and the MPEG 4 AVC formats, but where are the implementation lists for MPEG 1, MPEG 2?

Split

I think the template should be split in "Video Compression Software Implementations", "Audio Compression Software Implementations" etc

Now it's so big that's terrifying, and it will grow larger if we add Mpeg 1, Mpeg 2, Theora and Dirac

Tar

Is Tar really an archiver with compression? From `man tar`: GNU ‘tar’ saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive, and can restore individual files from the archive. Artem-S-Tashkinov (talk) 09:50, 16 May 2010 (UTC)