WinRAR 5.0 Beta 1 released!

Latest Version of WinRAR features a new and advanced archive format which makes archiving faster, more efficient and secure compared to previous versions of WinRAR.

Berlin, 29.04.2013 – win.rar GmbH and RARLAB present the first Beta version of WinRAR 5.0. The world’s leading compression software has incorporated a number of innovations for the RAR-format. The new RAR5 format provides many improvements of existing features of WinRAR and creates RAR5 files with higher compression ratio and speed gain on multi-core systems for decompression.

Due to changes in the RAR format, WinRAR 5.0 Beta 1 can create larger dictionaries up to 1 GB in 64 bit version of WinRAR which leads to higher compression in solid archive mode on large similar files.

The increased of speed derives from the use of multithreaded decompression on multi-core systems for lower redundancy data.

So far, users of the RAR format have benefited from the integration of 128-bit AES encryption. Based upon popular demand we have upgraded the RAR algorithm to include 256-bit AES encryption to ensure sensitive data is safe from undesired access.

Based on the demand of many users the limitation of maximum archived file path length in RAR archive is changed from 260 to 2048.

Another major improvement is the new recovery record function which is based upon the Reed-Solomon error correction codes making archive recovery stronger. In test scenarios with a 1 GB archive, 10% recovery record and average damage size of 32 KB, WinRAR was able to fix 9x more damages relative to the previous version. Also, the new recovery record is much more efficient than the old to fix insertions, deletions, not only when data has been modified but when data positions are shifted.

The file identification within RAR archive has been enhanced by using BLAKE2sp hash as a file checksum. With BLAKE2 inclusion, one can definitively detect whether files are different or the same while using CRC32, two different files may share the same value. Furthermore, CRC32 is shorter and therefore there is a small chance it will not detect a corrupt file and some classes of errors unlike BLAKE2.

More information on the improved items and fixed bugs can be found here:
https://www.win-rar.com/whatsnew.html.

Another tip: for all Windows-64-bit users, it is highly recommended to install the WinRAR 64-bit version. It is faster and offers best available integration. WinRAR’s compression speed in Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 or any other multi-core-system has been increased considerably.

WinRAR is available in more than 40 different languages and is compatible with Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 and Windows 8. The command line version of WinRAR is also available for Linux, FreeBSD and MAC OS X.

WinRAR is the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows version of the RAR Archiver, the powerful archiver and archive manager, which supports also multi-core-processors. RAR files can usually compress content up to 30 percent more effectively than ZIP files. The most important functions of WinRAR include extremely powerful document and multimedia file compression, processing of other archive formats, programmable self-extracting archives (SFX), damaged archive repair, authenticity verification, Unicode support and archive encryption.