The archive manager has a lot of new features available in this latest version

Apr 29, 2013 11:33 GMT  ·  By

RAR, a powerful archive manager that can be used to reduce the size of files and to decompress RAR, ZIP and other format, has been updated to version 5.00 Beta 1.

Every new version of RAR comes with a lot of new features and it brings a new format to the market. This is just the case with the new release, as it introduces the 5.0 format.

As you might expect, archives created with RAR 5.0 can only be opened with the new software. Older version, like 4.0, won't be able to decompress the archives.

Highlights of RAR 5.00 Beta 1:

• The dictionary size for RAR 5.0 is now 32 MB, which means that users should expect higher compression ratio and a lower speed; • The -md switch syntax has been modified to support larger dictionary sizes; • Intel IA-32 executable and delta compression algorithms have been included in RAR 5.0, but the older 4.x branch will not support any of those features; • The application can now utilize several CPU cores, improving the decompression speed on large files or when using BLAKE2 checksums; • File names and archive comments that use UTF-8 encoding are now permitted; • RAR 5.0 recovery record is now based on Reed-Solomon error correction codes; • The recovery record is more resistant to damage and can use partially corrupt recovery record data; • The "Test" command now verifies the validity of the RAR 5.0 recovery record; • The encryption algorithm has been changed from AES-128 to AES-256 in CBC mode. Key derivation function is now based on PBKDF2 using HMAC-SHA256.

A complete list of changes, improvements, and fixes can be found in the official announcement. Download RAR 5.00 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.