VLC Player download from Univ. of Wisconsin not working

[werewolf]

Hi there,
the files that come from the download at Univ. of Wisconsin mirror are not the same as the rest. I don't have the time to investigate what the story is, and a subsequent download from the Japanese mirror installed OK, but the former mirror will not actually install - it will run the media player without actually installing it on the PC; leaves nothing on the HD.
Cheers

Peter

[VLC_help]

Sounds strange. There isn't single exe VLC that you could just run.

[werewolf]

Yeah, you tell me. It's in zipped format, and when you try to unzip it into a directory, it won't go anywhere, but when you just run the VLC.exe from within the rar by itself, it runs the program ... but no install onto the PC, siree. I am running it under Vista. The RAR contains no install files as such.

[VLC_help]

VLC ain't shared on RAR packets. exe, zip and 7z only.

[werewolf]

This is as the file set downloaded from UOW: vlc-0.8.6i-win32, from WinRAR it looks like: archive (.7z) vlc-0.8.6i-win32.7z - 7-Zip archive, unpacked size 34,018,485 bytes, which contains 7 folders + 11 files.

[VLC_help]

You are using latest WinRAR?

[werewolf]

The winRAR version is 3.7 The relevant piece of information, in the whole thread, imho, is the fact that the download from UOW repeatedly exhibited the same peculiar behaviour, whereas the download from Japan worked the first time without any changes. Since the conditions on my end never changed between the downloads, and the only variable was the VLC file's origin, one could possibly extrapolate that the UOW files were different to those from Japan.

[VLC_help]

I assume you mean http://mirror.services.wisc.edu/mirrors ... i-win32.7z
I downloaded it and it is same file that you can for example download from
http://ftp1.srv.endpoint.nu/pub/softwar ... i-win32.7z
and md5sum also matches.

[werewolf]

The file that originally came from the UOW link, same as you've tried, came down as vlc-0.8.6i-win32.7z . When double clicked, it defaulted to winRAR for unzipping and did what I described above. A file which I downloaded this morning from the same location, http://www.videolan.org/mirror.html?mir ... -win32.exe, goes into install when double clicked. I can only assume that the file which was at UOW last week is not there today. A file which downloaded from the Japanese mirror at http://www.videolan.org/mirror.html?mir ... -win32.exe site worked first time. I still have the original UOW zipped file set on my PC and it still does the same trick.
Looking at the links you have listed in your reply, they point to a zip fileset, while the links at the VLC download page point to filesets with exe extensions. When I download the file from your link, it comes down in zipped format - when unpacking by WinRAR, the only executable file is VLC.exe. Running it does exactly the same trick as the original UOW download - it opens and runs VLC, but does not install.

[Makoto]

Are you extracting the entire directory structure within the archive, intact?

The .exe files should be the installer version, and will create all the directories and put everything in the proper places.
What happens if you simply open the UOW .7z archive in WinRAR and use WinRAR's 'test archive' feature on it? (Note: I don't know what WinRAR calls it, as I don't use WinRAR... or even if WinRAR has a Test Archive feature for 7-zip archives. You can always get the official 7-zip archive shell from www.7-zip.org and see if the problems persist there.)

[VLC_help]

7z files aren't installers as Makoto pointed out. They are normal archive files which you extract. So I assume you downloaded 7z instead of exe and got confused?

[werewolf]

Let me go back to the original problem I had: I downloaded a file set from UOW. It came down as 7z. I had no option to select otherwise. When opened with WinRAR, which opened it by default, the only .exe file within it was vlc.exe, which is not an install file. Unpacking the entire file set and its dir's produced the same result. Then I downloaded a new fileset from the Japanese mirror, which came down as .exe Again, I had no choice in that. When executed, it installed VLC on the first go. As I had no choices to make along the way, and as the two filesets behaved in different manners, I wouldn't say I got confused. One set worked, the other did not.
Thanks for your input and feedback, guys. VLC is working, and that's main thing. I don't want to drag this out ad nauseam, and as much as I am itching to keep pecking at it (that's the ex WANG SW support part of me ... HD capacity was measured in MBs then and Pentium was still bottlefed) I have to keep a pragmatic approach. VLC works. Thanks again.
Cheers