Windows – What ZIP compression method do common OS’s natively support

If you want compatibility with the Zip Folders capability built into Windows XP, you're stuck with Deflate compression. I don't think you can even use Deflate64, much less the advanced compression methods (like LZMA, PPMD, WavPack, Bzip2, etc.) available in recent versions of winZip and PowerArchiver. PowerArchiver at least defaults to using the .zipx extension for those files -- I don't think WinZip is doing that yet.

The smallest possible zip file that 7-Zip can create can be done with the following command line:

7za a -mm=Deflate -mfb=258 -mpass=15 -r C:\Path\To\Archive.zip C:\Path\To\Files\*

Of particular note: 7-Zip's wildcard parser is not the same as most others on the system. *.* means all files that have extensions. * means all files.

Creating .zip files this way (and, presumably, using other tools that attempt to make smaller "standard" .zip files) is really, really slow. You would most likely save considerable time and space by using 7-Zip or WinRar to create self extracting archives.

To create the smallest standard ZIP file that 7-Zip can create, try:

7z a -mm=Deflate -mfb=258 -mpass=15 -r foo.zip C:\Path\To\Files\*

^{Source: How can I achieve the best, standard ZIP compression?}

Otherwise if you don't care about the ZIP standard, use the following ultra settings:

7z a -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on archive.7z dir1

Which are:

-t7z   7z archive

-m0=lzma
       lzma method

-mx=9  level of compression = 9 (Ultra)

-mfb=64
       number of fast bytes for LZMA = 64
-md=32m
       dictionary size = 32 megabytes

-ms=on solid archive = on