MacItBetter - Support Forum

Hidden Options in BetterZip

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 03:54:16 -0400

Here's a list of hidden options in BetterZip. You can fiddle with these to change behavior that I didn't think needs to be changed by 99.75% of users. However, I thought this shouldn't keep the remaining 0.25% (or 0.635 persons) from being happy with BetterZip.

Before setting any of these options quit BetterZip. Then open the terminal (Terminal.app), copy the command into the window, and press the Return key.

If you want to go back to the default factory settings (sure, I don't have a real factory, but it sounds cool), copy the delete command into the terminal window and press Return.

MIBOpenExtractedFolder
If you are annoyed that every time you do a 1-Click-Extract a Finder window with the extraction location is popped right into your face, turn it off with this option.

defaults write com.macitbetter.betterzip MIBOpenExtractedFolder NO

Go back to default with:

defaults delete com.macitbetter.betterzip MIBOpenExtractedFolder

MIB7ZipSwitchesForCreate
If you are a 7-zip super-power user, and find BetterZip too childish, because it doesn't let you set your favorite command line switches, use this option to set these switches and they will be used during the archive creation process:

defaults write com.macitbetter.betterzip MIB7ZipSwitchesForCreate -array "-ms=on" "-mhe=on"

This one is a little more complicated, true, but as 7-zip veteran you already figured out what is happening here: After the -array all the switches you like to add are listed in double quotes and separated by spaces.
In the example above, I added -ms=on, which will create solid archives which compress with a better ratio and -mhe=on which adds header encryption when turning encryption in the save panel on.

Go back to default with:

defaults delete com.macitbetter.betterzip MIB7ZipSwitchesForCreate

F.A.Q.

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 06:06:11 -0400

Registration and Registration Keys

Q: I haven't received my key after I bought BetterZip.
A: If you are using a free e-mail service like GMail, your transaction may be subjected to extended fraud checking, which is required by credit card companies. If your key doesn't arrive within 8 hours, please contact me.

Q: My registration key doesn't work.
A: Please, make sure that you copy the complete code (four lines of numbers and letters, ending with an equal sign into the text field in the registration window.

Q: I have lost my registration key. Can you resend it, please?
A: Of course. Enter your e-mail address into this form (this is a free service).

Compression and Extraction

Q: I compressed a PDF, JPG, MP3, MOV, or AVI file, but the compressed file is not much smaller than the original file. What's wrong?
A: Nothing is wrong. Multimedia files like music, images, and videos are usually already compressed as good as possible. Compressing them with an archiver cannot squeeze out many more bytes from the file.

Q: Someone sent me this Word file and I couldn't open it, but BetterZip was able to extract it. Now Word cannot open the files I extracted.
A: You have probably received a new Word docx file, and use Word 2004. You should not extract such files, but instead get the Microsoft file converter from here. Install the converter and run your files through it. For further support with this, please contact Microsoft.

Q: Why doesn't BetterZip display the compressed sizes of files in tgz and tbz archives as well as in certain RAR and 7z archives?
A: This is due to the way these formats work: First an uncompressed tar archive is created then this tar file is compressed with BZip2 or GZip, which are both limited to compressing one file. So, tar has no knowledge about the compression factors while GZip and BZip2 don't have knowledge about the contents of the tar file.

Some RAR and 7z archives are compressed with the solid option which leads to better compression ratios. With this option files are not compressed individually, but all together. The compression ratio can thus not be reported on a file level, but only on the archive level.

Spinning beachball before extraction

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:07:51 -0400

Hello Robert,

I'm extracting a split rar archive (.rar, .r00 etc) and am noticing something that didn't happen before.

Before extraction begins (extraction windows still says 'ProgressWindow'), there's a good 10-15 seconds where I get the spinning beachball and a lot of HD activity..
After that, extraction begins and proceeds as normal.

It seems to have been introduced by 1.7.3..

Any ideas?

betterzip uncompress automatically

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:23:10 -0400

Hi my name is Iván.
I´m from Spain and so I don´t speak english very well but I can try it.
I buy betterzip and I think that it is fantastic but I have a question about it

When I unload (download) a "compress archiver" from internet, Betterzip uncompress it automatically , and I don't want it, I want uncompress it manually, with double click....

What is the solution for my small problem?

Thanks

Mobile Me ZIP Files Problem

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:03:41 -0400

Hi guys,

I have the following problem: Every time I download a zipfile from MobileMe that contains files with special characters (ä,ö,ü) BetterZip cannot unpack it. It works fine with Finder's Decompressor so the zipfile is not corrupt or anything. I am unsure what is the cause of that :-/. I have created a test.zip to demonstrate the problem. http://www.schanzer.eu/test.zip
---

Hi Leute,
ich habe folgendes Problem: Jedesmal wenn ich ZIP-Dateien aus MobileMe runterlade, die Dateien mit Umlauten enthalten, weigert sich BetterZIP, die Dateien zu entpacken. Mit Apple's Finder (Archivierungsprogramm) funktioniert es wunderbar also die Dateien sind grundsätzlich eigentlich nicht kaputt. Komische Sache :-/. Hier mal eine Testdatei, vielleicht fällt ja jemand etwas dazu ein: http://www.schanzer.eu/test.zip

Why is Zip "recommended" and isn't 7 Zip better? Or for that matter, RAR?

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:42:22 -0400

I'm new to all this. For years I've just used Stuffit and have been frustrated with the constant crashing etc. So I've been happy with BetterZip, but I'm curious why, when I choose the compression format, Zip says "recommended" next to it. Is this going to return better results?
From searching around the web, it seems like 7 Zip is supposed to be better. If so, wouldn't that be "recommended"? And while we're here, it also seems from searching around online that RAR is tops. I downloaded the RAR app (trial for 40 days) and have done a few tests.

I'm needing to backup a bunch of DV footage - hundreds of gigs. I normally let BetterZip chug away for a day and then when it's done I compare the results. For roughly 10GB of footage I got a slightly smaller file size with 7 Zip that I did with RAR (didn't expect this).

What do you guys think? Which format am I best with? I don't need to cut them up into specific sizes; just want to get the smallest file size for backups.

Thanks for any insight!

Pax

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:56:25 -0400

BetterZip appears to handle pax files fine, however there is no file association for it. Pax is not listed in the preferences and when I choose Open With on a pax file BetterZip is not listed.
[edit] Okay, so it seems pax is just cpio, in which case BetterZip merely needs to recognise the .pax extension as being cpio.

The file I'm looking at is 1.4GB and the performance is very poor (which seems odd as pax has no compression). I'm basically seeing the same things I previously reported about sit, albeit without the fast previews.
Quote:
- Previews load very fast! However if I try to actual extract an individual file it takes an awfully long time, as if it has to extract the entire archive just to get that single file (the archive is >100MB) but this would contradict the speed of the preview.
- Assuming it does have to extract the whole archive, subsequent extractions should be very fast, no?
- Due to the long time it takes to extract, I'm free to continue to browse the archive while it's working. However I notice that once it's finished, what it actually extracted was the currently selected files, not the ones that I first dragged to the desktop.
- No progress bar? Other archive types drop down a little sheet to show extraction progress but the .sit file just gives the little whirly thing in the corner. If this were changed it would prevent the previous problem as you can't do anything while the progress sheet is displayed.

Bug reading-modifying-saving TGZ files

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:17:32 -0400

Love BetterZip... use it all the time!

One of the nicer features is being able to create TGZ archives, load them in BetterZip, clean out the mac-specific files, and re-save.

Unfortunately, with 1.7.2, when saving the tgz file, it reports success, but actually saves as an uncompressed tar file.

Simple to reproduce - open any tgz file, make a change, and save. The new archive will be saved as tgz, but the actual file type will be a POSIX tar file.

Cheers,
-Andrew.

CRC32 Column

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:12:17 -0400

Hi, I'm trying for 1 day BetterZip and it seems a very good program, congrats!
But... I was wondering... Is there a way to view a column with the checksum (CRC32) of the archived files (like in many WinRAR-like applications) in the application window?
I know it isn't an important feature, and maybe a few people may find it useful..
but for me it is so (I can quickly compare the content of many archives). And since I think it isn't to difficult to develop that, perhaps there's already a hidden option for it.
Is there?

ps: I'm sorry for my poor English, I hope it can be understood easily.

Bug with zip filenames containing the '$' character?

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:50:30 -0400

Just found that betterzip (1.7.2) seems to have an issue with zipfiles whose name contains the character '$'. Issue is betterzip always asks for a password when opening the file (with doubleclick) even if the zipfile is not password protected.

I can send a zipfile that replicates the bug or you can:
1) create with betterzip a new zipfile named test.zip with no password
2) rename with finder the file test.zip to test$test.zip
3) open test$test.zip and you will be asked for a password even if the zipfile is not password protected.

Also note that betterzip dos not let you save the zipfile with a filename containing the character '$'

Paolo

RAR-extraction to NAS-disk or Windows drive returns access error

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:09:19 -0400

Hi!

I'm using a MacMini 1.66Ghz Intel CoreDuo with 1Gb RAM and OSX 10.4.
When trying to extract 5GB DVD-ISO's compressed into multiple RAR-archives to my D-Link DL-323 NAS-disk (already mounted) I get the error:
"BetterZip cannot extract to this folder. Maybe you don't have write access"

Browsing to the NAS drive in Finder and copying to the drive from there works just fine.
I get the exact same error message when trying to extract to a mapped Windows drive (where I also have write access).

Any suggestions?
Please get back to me if you need further info.

Rock on!
/ Jon

RAR-extraction speed slow?

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:01:47 -0400

Hi!

I'm using a MacMini 1.66Ghz Intel CoreDuo with 1Gb RAM and OSX 10.4.
When extracting 5GB DVD-ISO's compressed into multiple RAR-archives it progresses, sloooow...
My Athlon XP 3500 (stoneage CPU) with WinRAR extracts the archives nearly twice as fast.
When looking at the CPU of the MacMini, it only uses some 10% on each core, so I guess that the RAR-archiving isn't really optimized, or am I missing something?

I'm searching for a good util for my RAR-archives, but will not pay for anything that's not tip-top :P

Kind regards, and kudos for an otherwise nice-looking app!
/ Jon

Cannot open CBR Files

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:50:34 -0400

When I try to open cbr files with BetterZip, it does not open the files as in previous versions but thinks I want to create a new RAR archive. 100% reproducible.

For Example: If I open a file called "test.cbr" using "Open With", BetterZip does not try to open "test.cbr" but insteads opens a new archive called "test.rar".

Looks to me like BetterZip knows by the extension that is is a rar file and before trying to open it changes the .cbr to rar. When it now tries to open this file it cannot find it and therefore goes in "new archive" mode.

No problems with .cbz files. Haven't tried with other Extensions listed for RAR Files.

I tried an older version and this worked fine. This bugs seems to be introduced with 1.7.x.

A more simple zip

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:58:01 -0400

Hi
I'm trying to make ABZ a bit more friendly.
In the long slow way, this is needed to zip a file:

I have to

run ABZ
open a window
drag the item to the window
press save
press return
press close window
tell it I don't want to save the window
tell it to quit.

Now: I can speed that up by setting ABZ to open a window when it's run, so drag and drop works to there.

I could set one click, instead of using save.

But when I close the window, I still get a query if I want to save the contents, to which I must reply.

It seems that there is no way to disable that last warning.

I almost have a quicKeys macro done to make this as simple as "compress" (in the contextual menu, as supplied by the OS) already is....

But I cannot get past that annoying bit where it asks me if I want to save the window when I'm done.

Any suggestions?

(Checking or unchecking the surpress warnings in prefs makes no difference)

It would be nice if there were a "zip one file and quit" option, instead of me having to jump through all these hoops... :-)

BetterZip 1.7 cannot extract encrypted Zip-archives

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:40:45 -0400

Hi Robert,

their appears to be an issue with BetterZip version 1.7 (223) and encrypted Zip-files. Whilst they can be opened, they cannot be extracted. Trying to do so results in this error message:

"The archive extraction failed. The transcript drawer may contain further details."

This is the message from the transcript drawer:

"Loading archive: /Users/Thomas/Desktop/Archive/080619.zip

Processing archive: /Users/Thomas/Desktop/Archive/080619.zip

Extracting 080619.jpg
Enter password (will not be echoed) :
Data Error in encrypted file. Wrong password?

Sub items Errors: 1"

The archive was created using BetterZip. It makes no difference whether I use PKzip2 or AES-256 encryption. Unencrypted Zip-files work fine though. Also, the archives I created do not seem to be corrupted since I am able to unpack them with PathFinder, 7zX, and Zipeg.

My OS version is 10.5.3

Thomas