Play movie files in multi-file .rar archives

akaidiot · Postby **akaidiot** » 02 Sep 2005 14:08

I must say that videolan is a robust video player. Thanks to everyone for working so hard to make the best video player!

It has all the features you could ever want. Except one:

* Play movie files in multi-file .rar archives. So it will play a movie that is split up in .rar,.r01,r02,etc.

Also if, possible with seeking in movie.

Thanks & Bye!

dionoea · Postby **dionoea** » 03 Sep 2005 22:30

this will never be available in VLC for two simple reasons :
* no open source (gpl compatible) library is available to decompress latest rar file versions
* it is not really the media player's job to do this

sorry

akaidiot · Postby **akaidiot** » 04 Sep 2005 11:23

this will never be available in VLC for two simple reasons :
* no open source (gpl compatible) library is available to decompress latest rar file versions
* it is not really the media player's job to do this

sorry

What about UnRARlib? It's licensed under GPL license

And what job the media player has is only in the hands of the makers of it

dionoea · Postby **dionoea** » 05 Sep 2005 00:28

from the FAQ: "Currently, only the RAR 2.0 archive format is supported."

akaidiot · Postby **akaidiot** » 05 Sep 2005 01:11

Yes, and to my understanding that is what most rar compressed movies I have encountered are compressed in. So I guess that is fine with me

Guest · Postby **Guest** » 09 Sep 2005 04:42

Why not uncompress them? Compressed archives of video don't compress very well and isn't really worth keeping all those annoying .r00, .r001, .r002, etc. files around.

Guest · Postby **Guest** » 21 Sep 2005 23:35

hehe i just joined this forum about this

this would be so cool. u leech a movie from the net and b4 its even complete u can start watching it without beginning to unrar and press enter on winrar again and again so movie keep unraring b4 player doesnt find the data ...

Guest · Postby **Guest** » 22 Sep 2005 13:55

Scene releases (most movies let's face it) aren't compressed anyway, so it is pointless keeping .rar files on your pc. Scene releases are released in .rar uncompressed format just for ease of transport over the net and to fit in with scene rules.

J.C. · Postby **J.C.** » 05 Nov 2005 05:50

Still, sometimes people don't have the space for both the rar files and the movie file and preffer to keep the rar files.

from my experiance vlc already handles playing form rar files very well, the only problem is support for muli-part archives which i would very much like to see.

J.C. · Postby **J.C.** » 06 Nov 2005 09:54

dionoea: isn't it possible to add support for multi-file archives using the current supported rar format ?

Postby **fkuehne** » 06 Nov 2005 17:15

@J.C. This might be possible, but I don't think that anyone in the team is willing to spend time on this. We are always open for patches though.
The development on VLC is mostly done by the principle "implement what you personally need". Most of us think that they don't need this, ergo they don't implement it.
Additionally, a media player isn't responsible to extract files automatically. That's the special field of a decompression-application in my opinion. If we were implementing complete rar-support, the next time people would ask us to implement zip-support, etc. pp. so we would end up with a huge app which can decrypt everything, although these features are used by very few people only, because most of our users download VLC to be able to play movies, not to decompress movies.

J.C. · Postby **J.C.** » 07 Nov 2005 13:31

i'll look into it if i'm able to find the time though i'm not familiar with the vlc code, i just though it was a very cool feature when i accidently chose a rar file and vlc started playing the video file inside it, and was a bit disapointed when it stoped playing after if was done with the first rar file of the multi-part rar archive.

brian · Postby **brian** » 07 Nov 2005 19:31

J.C.: So if you had put the rar files into the playlist would it have played them all correctly?
(With a delay/gap between files probably...)

J.C. · Postby **J.C.** » 08 Nov 2005 16:55

afraid not brian, this probably has to do with the way rar files are built but vlc is unable to handel the files other than the first (.rar) file

J.C. · Postby **J.C.** » 08 Nov 2005 17:23

Fkuehne: tried looking through the source code but couldn't find the relevant section it seems vlc is able to handle zip and rar files in store mode (no compression), do you know where this is implemented in the code ? or if this feature is unintentional could it be derived from the zlib ?

chemi0 · Postby **chemi0** » 17 Jan 2006 00:53

i would love to see this feature in vlc, this feature is included in xbmc, in the latest version, people that want to make patches, could look at there implementation to see how they do it. is good for not only space issues but network drives and other such situations

Jonte · Postby **Jonte** » 23 Jan 2006 07:28

Yep this would rock, iguess most people dont even knew they want it so therfore not many are asking for it. But when they discower how nice it is to have they will love it!!

superture · Postby **superture** » 23 Jan 2006 11:52

This feature would be really nice!

anonymous guest · Postby **anonymous guest** » 13 Feb 2006 00:43

I just write this msg in order to tell you that I would really appreciate the implementation of this wanted feature

and as you say "implement what you personally need" I want to show you with my posting that there's really a need for this feature.

Furthermore there aren't so many steps left as the playback support for single rar files is already done

Supporting multiple rar-files wouldn't mean the duty of implementating tons of other wanted and less important features too
e.g. the zip support which you're frightend of somebody would demand it then - nobody has got zipped movies on hdd and wants to playback them
but it's reality that a quite big mass has got movies on hdd packed in multi rar-files and that they've got the same opinion like me and would like to skip the extraction with winrar

for this reason I want to encourage the vlc team to think if might be worth to implement the wanted feature though

Thank you for your Time

Guest · Postby **Guest** » 13 Feb 2006 04:30

and as you say "implement what you personally need" I want to show you with my posting that there's really a need for this feature.

Well good. Now please write the code for us and I'm sure one of the developers will put it in VLC

Postby **tonsofpcs** » 14 Feb 2006 19:33

From what I understand of the RAR format, the entire archive has to be extracted for the contents to be accessable. Extracting these multipart RAR files, as you may have noticed, takes a considerable ammount of processor time. I doubt that it would be possible to do this for realtime playback, except for **possibly** the store method.

Sparks · Postby **Sparks** » 15 Feb 2006 12:44

Sorry not true, as XBMC plays RAR files (and is open source) and allows seeking....

It does this instantly (eg no time for decompression)

Guest · Postby **Guest** » 15 Feb 2006 19:51

Sorry not true, as XBMC plays RAR files (and is open source) and allows seeking....

It does this instantly (eg no time for decompression)

hmm... ok, so where is this magic unrar code? I browsed through http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/xbmc/ but I didn't see anything resembling a rar unpacker.

The DJ · Postby **The DJ** » 16 Feb 2006 05:53

This has been explained time and time again in the past.

1: It's possible
2: None of the current Developers is probably gonna do it.

Drejk · Postby **Drejk** » 18 Feb 2006 23:33

Well then what is "feature requestig" good for if noone will implement what he doesn't need anyways..

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