CAB to TAR.BZ (TBZ) Converter
Convert your cab files to tar.bz online & free
cab
tar.bz
How to convert CAB to TAR.BZ
Select files from Computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, URL or by dragging it on the page.
Choose tar.bz or any other format you need as a result (more than 200 formats supported)
Let the file convert and you can download your tar.bz file right afterwards
About formats
CAB (Cabinet) is a compressed archive format developed by Microsoft for efficient software distribution and Windows component packaging. Introduced around 1996, CAB files serve as the container format for Windows Installer packages (.msi), Windows system updates, driver distributions, and ActiveX component downloads. The format supports three compression algorithms — MSZIP (Microsoft's Deflate implementation), Quantum (statistical compression), and LZX (an LZ77 variant with Huffman coding optimized for executable files) — with LZX typically delivering the highest ratios. CAB archives organize files into folders (compression units) where files within the same folder are compressed as a continuous stream for improved ratios, and archives can span multiple volumes for distribution on size-limited media. One advantage is deep Windows ecosystem integration — CAB files are handled natively by Windows without third-party software, used in everything from OS installation media to driver packages and system updates. The LZX compression algorithm provides another strength, achieving particularly strong compression on compiled code and PE executables, which is ideal for the format's primary role in software distribution. Microsoft's makecab tool ships with every Windows installation, and CAB extraction is built into Windows Explorer. The format continues to serve as infrastructure for Windows deployment and update mechanisms across enterprise and consumer environments.
TAR.BZ is a compound archive format pairing the TAR archiver with bzip compression. The TAR layer concatenates files into a single stream with full Unix metadata (permissions, ownership, timestamps, symlinks), and the bzip algorithm compresses the resulting stream. The bzip family of compressors uses block-sorting techniques derived from the Burrows-Wheeler transform, which rearranges data to group similar bytes together before applying move-to-front encoding and Huffman compression. This approach typically achieves better compression ratios than gzip/Deflate, particularly on text and source code. TAR.BZ archives are common on Unix and Linux systems for distributing source packages and backups where improved compression over TAR.GZ is desired. One advantage is strong compression on text-heavy data — block-sorting algorithms excel at compressing source code, log files, and structured text, producing meaningfully smaller archives. The two-layer design is another practical strength: the TAR container handles archiving concerns (metadata, directory structure) while the compression layer operates on the full concatenated stream, maximizing cross-file redundancy exploitation. TAR.BZ files can be processed by standard Unix tools and extracted by 7-Zip, WinRAR, and other cross-platform archivers.