A new plugin that integrates the functionality of 7-Zip is supplied with Directory Opus 10. This supplements the in-built Zip support with the following additional features:
Support for key 7-Zip (.7z) archive format.
Support for additional archive formats (.arj, .bz2, .cab, .gz, .lzh, .tar, .z).
Support for directly entering and modifying .tar.gz archives and similar (the outer archive is de-compressed and re-compressed as needed).
Support for disc images (.iso, .wim, etc.).
Support for reading RAR archives (replaces the original Opus RAR plugin).
Support for writing/creating RAR archives if WinRAR is installed.
Does not require the 7-Zip program to be installed.
The in-built Zip support has been greatly enhanced in Directory Opus 10. Improvements include:
Unicode support (supports Unicode filenames in Zip files).
AES support (enhanced encryption).
Large file support (ZIP64 – supports archives > 4GB in size).
NTFS timestamp support (file timestamps are stored relative to UTC, so that time zone information can be preserved when extracted. This means the old “dopus-tz” time zone information stored in the Zip file comment is no longer needed).
Support for editing of Zip file comments (now that “dopus-tz” no longer overwrites it).
The ability to create Self-Extracting Zip files, including user-configurable icon, images and documentation.
Native x64 support (on 64-bit systems, Opus no longer needs a 32-bit COM proxy to support Zip).
Support for multi-volume archives (reading and writing).
Significant speed increases in reading Zip file contents and extracting from Zip files.
The option to include full paths when zipping.
With the addition of the 7-zip plugin, most references to Zip and Zip files in the program have been replaced with the more general term Archives. For example, the “Directory Opus Zip” context menu is now called “Directory Opus Archives”. Opus supports creation and extraction of all supported archiving formats from the context menu, in both Opus and Explorer. There is a new Preferences page that controls which formats are shown in the context menu.
There is also a new Archives file type group that’s created by default, and is automatically updated whenever you enable or disable archive formats in Preferences. You can use this group to easily add your own context menus, etc, to the archive formats that Opus supports.