WinRAR Video

WinRAR Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:01

>> Hi, I'm Peter Butler from CNETdownload.com and today I'm taking a first look at WinRAR, the popular compression and archiving utility. Along with WinZip, WinRAR is the big impression kit on the block and it has been gaining favor in recent years because of better compression ratios and more importantly, speedier extraction of files from existing archives. WinRAR can create archives as either zip or RAR files and it can extract files from a wide range of file formats including those two main formats as well as seven zip, ISO, ACE, Bzip2 and a whole bunch of others. WinRARs main interface looks a lot like WinZip's, with a big window for browsing your files, large buttons at the top for adding files to an archive, extracting files from an archive and viewing and deleting files. Also like WinZip, there is a wizard button at the top to walk you through the experience of unpacking files, creating a new archive, or adding files to an existing archive in a few quick steps. If you are right clicking, you can extract files from zip and RAR archives without even firing up WinRAR. Just right-click on the archive, select extract files, and specify a location, voila. You can specify which WinRAR actions you want included in the context menu during installation and you can change them later under the integration tab of the WinRAR settings. When compressing files into an archive, you can protect your finished product via 128 bit password encryption for zip or RAR files. If you are using the RAR format, you can go one step further, and encrypt all the information about your files that's included in your archive. Like WinZip, WinRAR is shareware. you can use the full version for a 40 day trial period but after that, you must pay for the software. WinRAR is a full-featured compression and extraction tool with strong compression ratios and speedy performance. Whether or not it's worth the 30 bucks is entirely up to you. This has been Peter Butler for CNETdownload.com taking a first look at WinRAR. ^M00:01:59 [ Music ]