Saturday, February 13, 2016

Universal Extractor and updated “builds”

One of the most important utilities that I use weekly is the Universal Extractor from LegRoom.net.

It has a very large version of supported formats for archive unpacking but hasn’t been updated in a very long time.

I’ve manually updated some of the included binaries from time to time, but the Inno Setup Unpacker file is the one I need updated regularly. I get it from innounp and overwrite the older version in my bin folder. Current version as of the time of this release is 0.45 and supports Inno Setup versions 2.0.7 through 5.5.7 for all your unpacking needs.

I was excited to learn about a project to try to update not just the various unpacker binaries but the application itself.

Universal Extractor 2 – Bioruebe.com (changelog here)

From the project page:

As a short overview here is a list of the core improvements:

  • Batch mode
  • Silent mode, not showing any prompts
  • Scan only mode to determine file types without extracting
  • Integrated updater
  • 100+ new supported file types
  • Audio and video extraction for multimedia files
  • Cascading context menu
  • Support for password list for common archives
  • Improved optional status box with progress indicator
  • New detection methods + more detailed output and error messages
  • Support for some extractors not shipping with UniExtract as plugins
  • Resource usage/speed improvements, lots of fixes
  • First start assistant instead of installer
  • Full functionality available in no-install version
  • Auto-using 64 bit versions of extractors if supported by OS

Martin Brinkmann at ghacks.net has a good review of the differences; First look at Universal Extractor 2

I’ve not tossed out the original UE app that I’ve been using all these years but I’m keeping this one close by for comparisons.

Cheers.

--Claus Valca

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