Dear users,

One of the most searched items on our site is our ZIPX support. So we would like to take time to explain how good our support for ZIPX really is.
PowerArchiver is (at the time of writing of this article), only tool that can properly and completely extract all zipx archives created by WinZip. Most other tools that claim so only support portion of ZIPX codecs.

PowerArchiverZIPX files can have multiple codecs inside:

  • Deflate – standard ZIP codec, used from the start, also found in regular ZIP files. PowerArchiver has multicore compression support for it, so when creating zipx files with deflate codecs, all your cpu cores will be utilized (unlike in competing products such as WinZip).
  • LZMA – advanced ZIPX codec, taken from open source 7-zip format (also available in PowerArchiver) and made part of ZIP standard. It compresses files a lot better than deflate, and is most of the reason that zipx files compress so much better. Again, PowerArchiver supports multi core compression here, unlike competition.
  • PPMd – context modeling based codec, also featured in new ZIP standard. We use it in our Optimized method for text file compression.
  • BZIP2 – Newer than deflate, with better compression and slightly slower speed. Fully supported in PowerArchiver.
  • WavPack – Codec for compressing specifically wav files. Fully supported in PowerArchiver.
  • Jpeg – Codec added by WinZip for specific support of jpeg images. PowerArchiver is only archiver currently that can extract zipx files with jpeg codec.

In addition to ZIPX codecs, PowerArchiver has great support for other advanced parts of ZIP format:

  • Support for unlimited size of ZIP/ZIPX archives.
  • Support for unlimited number of files in ZIP/ZIPX archives.
  • Support for AES encryption, as well as standard pkzip password protection. PowerArchiver is one of the few utilities that has support for both PkAes and WZAES encryption methods (transparent to the end user, it simply works).
  • Unicode support – PowerArchiver can create and extract Unicode zip archives.

I hope this article has been useful to our current and future users. Go to our download page to experience PowerArchiver – your multicore zipx compression utility ;-).