Streaming RAR files (3 Viewers)

[zag2me]

It serves a very tiny userbase....

You would be surprised its a requested feature for alot of HTPC apps and it just shows the innovation of xbox media center in this field that people have seen it and want it on other apps. I was browsing thegreenbutton forums(MCE) the other day and their is a similar long thread about it over there.

Agree it shouldn't take any resources away from something else though.

 

[Maedhros]

Hmmmm.....

I suppose that maybe I should spend a bit of time to make a proper plugin. Was thinking about it a long time ago when I first started to use MP, but never had the time to look into this issue.

I don't have much experience with MP plugins either, but looked at the code and it shouldn't be that hard to create I can see.

I already did some research on this subject back then and I found the Unrar.dll, which is a library published some time back by RarLabs themselves (though a bit unofficially as far as I remember). It has support for extraction using an in-memory buffer and then providing a stream of some sort it should be possible to implement a proper plugin for the purpose of streaming video from a rar-file.

I'm currently implementing an MSN plugin for automatically changing the display picture at given (or random) intervals in minutes, hour, days, weeks, or months. I only need to map a GUI setup for this plugin at the moment. So when I finish that, I might find time to experiment with this plugin for MP..... I hope ;-)

It definately looks like there is an interest for it

In the meantime it would be greatly appreciated if someone could tell me how to invoke MP's video-player to play data from a memory-stream. I haven't looked into this yet, so if it happens that it has not been implemented, I guess it might still be close enough to the core of MP that it would be faster for at developer with better knowledge of the inner workings to implement such a method

 

[diablo266]

Hmmmm.....

I suppose that maybe I should spend a bit of time to make a proper plugin. Was thinking about it a long time ago when I first started to use MP, but never had the time to look into this issue.

I don't have much experience with MP plugins either, but looked at the code and it shouldn't be that hard to create I can see.

I already did some research on this subject back then and I found the Unrar.dll, which is a library published some time back by RarLabs themselves (though a bit unofficially as far as I remember). It has support for extraction using an in-memory buffer and then providing a stream of some sort it should be possible to implement a proper plugin for the purpose of streaming video from a rar-file.

I'm currently implementing an MSN plugin for automatically changing the display picture at given (or random) intervals in minutes, hour, days, weeks, or months. I only need to map a GUI setup for this plugin at the moment. So when I finish that, I might find time to experiment with this plugin for MP..... I hope ;-)

It definately looks like there is an interest for it

In the meantime it would be greatly appreciated if someone could tell me how to invoke MP's video-player to play data from a memory-stream. I haven't looked into this yet, so if it happens that it has not been implemented, I guess it might still be close enough to the core of MP that it would be faster for at developer with better knowledge of the inner workings to implement such a method

absolutely fantastic, i wish you the best of luck!

 

[FreQi]

i tried the rarFS 0.0.8 with mediaportal.. doesn't work as mediaportal doesn't treat the rars like folders like explorer does

rarFS? Google came up with a bunch of chineese sites. Got a URL for an english site about it?

I was wondering if there might be something for ZIP file that would make windows treat the rar's like it natively does for Zips (aka ZipFolders) but you're right, even though a double click on the file shows the contents in the explorer window, the OS still knows they are files, not directories, so any application would treat them like files too. I'm not sure what would could change at an OS lever to make the rar's appear to be a directory unless you could do something like "mount" the file to a virtual "rar drive" like you do with an ISO or something.

Maybe that's it... make a virtual drive that mounts rar volume archives to a letter... MediaPortal could auto-mount the volume and then access it like any other read-only root file system...? (groos over-simplification, i know, but that's just the idea)

 

[zion22]

[
The movies in rar are stored, not compress (raring a divx will not affect the size), the only thing to do to read from rar i think, it's to skip the 48 bytes header from the 1st rar and start reading!

That should be entirely correct and something to sort out that sounds like a rather fast project.

On the other hand, you can mount .ISO files with Daemon Tools, so why not do the same way with .RAR files?
Gotta be something already made that does that.

 

[FreQi]

What about http://www.winmount.com/ ? It's not a free app, but it's the first thing I found before leaving from work (gotta get outta here!). Web site says "It can be used to mount ZIP, RAR, ISO,etc archives very fast, which enabling you to use the files inside it directly without needing extract it beforehand." Sounds like what we're talking about... Would then need a way to make MediaPortal auto-mount the rar's and read from there, right?

 

[rabies]

Has anything happened lately with this feature?

 

[snorkis]

The problem is only that built in media player (ugh) can't play raw streams from avi, i created a rar plugin a couple days ago (used the skeleton from the rar plugin by and-81 ). It will unrar with the help of unrar.dll (for now) in a seperate thread and after x chunks of data it will launch mplayer , after mplayer is done the file is deleted. It only plays the first avi|mkv|ts|mpg so far. If someone wants to try it out you can download a rar from http://www.psyksjuk.com/rarplayer.rar

NOTE: the remote control wont work as intended with the shipped mplayer config.

----------------------------- INSTRUCTIONS----------------
0.download http://www.psyksjuk.com/rarplayer.rar
1. place those 2 files in plugins\externalplayers\
2. download http://www7.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32/MPlayer-mingw32-1.0rc1.zip
3. extract mplayer to c:\mplayer, you can change that in the config but make sure the mplayer.exe's path is c:\mplayer\mplayer.exe
4. add .rar to media portal movies-> movies extension
(4.5 make sure the rar plugin is visible under external players)
5. play a rar file and the first movie file will be played

 

[sparky3387]

Ive grabbed the source and modified it SEVERELY so that it can list files and let you choose what file to play.......only problem is i didn't know how to get my plugin to be called from "My Videos" and "My Music" so for the moment it can only load C:\RAR.RAR from the Home Menu (Shouldn't be much work to finish it off), by the way i have not set it

Maybe the developers could implement this into My Videos/My Music?

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/myunrar-t30371.html?t=30371&highlight=myunrar

 

[on1yalad]

Snorkis

looks good overall. i ran into some problems

1. large HD movies don't seem to stream well
2. Cant get the remote to function for FF, Rewind, Pause
3. files in .001, .002, .003, etc show up each as a video file rather than just one video file

also it is funny reading how some people think rar streaming requests is us being lazy well it isn't with the HD shit coming out it can take upwards of 25 minutes to extract a 12GB 720p file and 40 for a 20GB 1080p file. so we aren't being lazy we are being efficient.

also for the people who are calling others who request rar streaming lazy, you obviously have no clue about XBMC which is possibly the greatest Media center front end ever created.

anyways nice job on the mplayer ext