The VideoLAN Forums

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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

@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.

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.

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...)

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

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 ?

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

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!!

This feature would be really nice!

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

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

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.

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

It does this instantly (eg no time for decompression)

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.

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.

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