What's new in FreeArc 0.40

FreeArc 0.40 is major revision of the program. Main changes from previous version are:

Full Russian docs (English translation will be made later)
Multimedia compression using TrueAudio, GRZIP and MM filter (controlled by -mm option)
Addition of delta filter improved compression of binary files by 2%
Using temporary files for memory-hungry compression modes allowed to double maximum dictionary size that sometimes increases compression by up to 10%
Enabling LZMA multithreading made compression 1.5x faster on dual-core CPUs (-mt)
Fast Tornado compression used in –m1 and –m2 modes, providing zip-like compression levels with 3 times better speed (10-50 mb/sec)
Support for user-defined external compressors in arc.ini, so now you can use your favorite compressors (LPAQ, PPMonstr, CCM and any other) inside .arc archives
Encryption of data and archive headers using AES, Blowfish, Twofish and Serpent algorithms; support for cipher chaining (e.g., aes+twofish+serpent) and keyfiles (-p, -hp, -kf, -ae, -op, -okf)
FAR and Total Commander plugins were updated to support all the new FreeArc features and fix old problems
Win32 and Linux-i386 versions plus sources with easy-to-follow building guide

There is also number of minor changes:

Use -mx for maximum internal compression
Use -max for maximum compression involving external programs (PPMonstr, ECM and Precomp as defined in shipped arc.ini)
It’s possible to use filelists and comment files stored in OEM, ANSI, UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings (-sc)
-env and –cfg options may be used to select alternative settings / config file
RAR-compatible options for filtering files by modification time, size and name (-ta, -tb, -tn, -to, -sl, -sm, -n)
Archives can be listed/extracted directly from the Internet: arc x http://www.haskell.org/bz/arc.arc
Archives can be restored using original from Internet: arc r bad.arc --original=http://www.haskell.org/bz/good.arc
New ‘lb’ command lists bare names of files in archive
‘y’ command renamed to ‘ch’ for compatibility with RAR; -pt option renamed to -tp
No more need to add “--recompress” when recompressing archives using “ch” command: try “Arc ch archive –mx”
--display option was greatly enhanced; use -di to quickly enable displaying all information
-z also works on archive extraction, saving archive comment to a file
Improved help displayed by “Arc”, added help to user queries
Temporary files are deleted when exiting by Ctrl-Break; all errors and warnings are reported to stderr, logfile and program exit code
Renamed groups in arc.groups config file: $audio -> $wav, $rgb -> $bmp; added $precomp, $jpg, $iso groups