you know dealing with video is the hardest and most frustrating thing I have ever tried on a computer.  I have tried practically every tool out there and it seems find but when you play it back on your DVD player, glitches, sound out of sync etc.   Even when you think You have it right you then take the DVD with you and try to play it on a Friends DVD player and you discover it was only ok for playing on yours! 
Out of all the progs I tried, including Tmpgenc, converttox, winavi Xilisoft dvd creator  etc etc,   only DeVeDe  created DVDs played back fine on MY DVD player, cant vouch for anyone elses.
These days however I tend to just use a device that can take my usb straight from my pc and I dont have to convert.

Well an interesting read these posts. Pity it got a bit heated.
I was just wondering if I was right to keep using winrar and if there was an alternative that would compress to a smaller size. Of course speed is a consideration to a degree.
FreeArc sounds interesting but I would want multivolume support. I may try using 7zip more often (i have it installed) and compare the results with Winrar.  Yeah whatever archiver you use has to support the more common formats in case you want to send a file to somone, in that case I think it has to be .zip or .rar support. On your own machine you can use what you want.
thanks for all the views!

Compression depends on the type of data being compressed. If you are attempting to compress an MP3, you will not save very much space as compared to compressing a word document or a plain text file.

What types of files are you attempting to compress?

-Josh (March 13, 2010, 08:25 AM)

yeah I know mp3 is already compressed, I was just wondering if winrar was the best or if others give you better compression.
I dont usually bother compressing word files or text as they dont take up much space. I was thinking more video files and pictures and maybe some pdf books as they can get quite large