Archiving files

All right I'll admit I am a archiving noob.

Anyways I am trying to archive a bunch of animes and iso's that I have on my computer so that the cd backups aren't as numerous(400GBs is a LOT of CD's). The problem I am having is that 7-zip and WinRAR don't seem to compress them very well(I have tried various options, though I'll admit I have not tried all of them); a 1.18 GB set of video files was reduced to 900~MB. To make matters worse I am having a hard time googling for 'ideal' options for compressing said files.

So if someone wouldn't mind explaining it to me I would be much obliged.

Anyways currently I have been told that WinACE does good video compression so I am giving it a go right now.

Your videos, most likely in divx/xvid/h.264 (and the equivalents for the sound) are already heavily compressed, which is why no archiver can make things significantly better than what you managed.

Any chance of getting a DVD burner? Or perhaps a USB hard drive that you can store all your stuff on (that way, you can take it around with you, as they aren't that big or heavy).

You can't efficiently comress videos. Most of the time it would actually make the file larger.

Just to add onto what the other people have said, the amount a file can be compressed depends upon what type of file it is, not what compressor/archiver program you use to compress the file.

buy a tape drive