Switch -MC<par> - set advanced compression parameters


This switch is intended mainly for benchmarking and experiments. In the real environment it is usually better to allow WinRAR to select optimal parameters automatically. Please note that improper use of this switch may lead to very serious performance and compression loss, so use it only if you clearly understand what you do.

It has the following syntax:

-mc[param1][:param2][module][+ or -]

where <module> is the one character field denoting a part of the compression algorithm, which has to be configured. It may have the following values:

A audio compression;
C true color (RGB) data compression;
D delta compression;
E 32-bit x86 executables compression;
I 64-bit Intel Itanium executables compression;
T text compression.

'+' sign at the end of switch applies the selected algorithm module to all processed data, '-' disables the module at all. If no sign is specified, WinRAR will choose modules automatically, based on data and the current compression method. Switch -mc- disables all optional modules and allows only the general compression algorithm.

<Param1> and <Param2> are module dependent parameters described below.

Audio compression, delta compression

<Param1> is a number of byte channels (can be 1 - 31).

WinRAR splits multibyte channels to bytes, for example, two 16-bit audio channels are considered by WinRAR as four channels one byte each.

<Param2> is ignored.

32-bit x86 Intel executables compression, 64-bit Intel Itanium executables compression, true color (RGB) data compression

<Param1> and <Param2> are ignored.

Text compression

<Param1> is the order of PPM algorithm (can be 2 - 63).

<Param2> is memory in megabytes allocated for PPM (1-128).

PPM uses the equal memory size both to compress and decompress, so if you allocate too much memory when creating an archive, other people may have problems when decompressing it on a computer with less memory installed. Decompression will be still possible using virtual memory, but it may become very slow.

Examples:

  1. switch -mc1a+ forces use of 8-bit mono audio compression for all data.
  2. switch -mc10:40t+ forces use of text compression algorithm for all data, sets the compression order to 10 and allocates 40 MB memory.
  3. switch -mc12t sets the text compression order to 12, when the text compression is used, but leaves to WinRAR to decide when to use it.
  4. switches -mct- -mcd- disable text and delta compression.
See also: