WinRAR 5.0 Beta 1 has been released by WinRAR Lab. You can download this new version for both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows operating system. This new WinRAR 5.0 version has introduced the new RAR 5 archiving format.
Whenever you want to compress the files with WinRAR, you can use this extra RAR 5 format with already available ZIP and RAR formats. Though the older versions of WinRAR and other third-party archivers won’t support this feature. Hence those archivers can’t decompress your RAR 5 archives.
So if you plan to send an archive with this new RAR 5 format, you have to keep in mind that compatibility issue of this RAR 5. If your friend or receiver of the RAR 5 archive files, can’t open that files using the 7-zip or other archivers. They might have receive errors like “File is corrupt” so something like this.
However this new WinRAR 5.0 also has support for the archive format of older RAR and Zip. You can still use that archive types to compress your files.
Key Changes in RAR 5 Format
- Maximum compression dictionary size is increased up to 1 GB in 64 bit WinRAR. You can use up to 256 MB Dictionary in 32 bit when creating an archive. Also, you can unpack the archives with dictionary size of 1 GB.
- RAR 5.0 recovery record is based on Reed-Solomon error correction codes which more resistant to damage of recovery record itself and can utilize a partially corrupt recovery record data.
- Archive created file times are stored as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) instead of Local time.
- WinRAR 5.0 encryption algorithm is changed from AES-128 to AES-256 in CBC mode. It has special password verification value which allows to detect most of the wrong passwords without necessity to unpack the entire file.
You can download this WinRAR 5.0 from RARLab to test this new archiver format. Currently it is not recommended to use the RAR5.0 compression format. Since it has the compatibility issue with most popular archivers applications.
Download WinRAR 5.0 Beta 1 (Windows 32 bit | 64 Bit, Linux, Mac OS X)
