Streaming RAR files (2 Viewers)

[zukex]

Streaming RAR support would most definately have to be done via virtual drives, which could easily be a separate project that would (hopefully) later be integrated to mediaportal just like it uses daemon tools for .bin etc., of course it would also mean that all other media players would work with it too (at least it could be made to work with everything if people just made .bat files)

and of course the it would only need to have support for uncompressed rars (which to me seem a lot like split files with just some header information about the date, filename, crc and such) so it should be possible to make it work nice and fast.

i believe i have seen rar mounting requested in daemon-tools forums too, tho i don't think anyone really gave any good reasons why it should be added to d-t, or i don't even remember if they mentioned if they wanted uncompressed support or just 'rar support'

thread on daemon-tools forums: http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/feature-mount-rar-zip-archives-t3982.html

but yeah, nice rar streaming on a pc media center surely is something i would personally pay $20 for

 

[MrT]

Yep. $20 will come from me as well, the day Media portal streams rar files.

 

[infinite.loop]

Yep. $20 will come from me as well, the day Media portal streams rar files.

you can try to find some devloper outside the team who will do it for money.

such "i will donate X amout of money if we get feature XY" is not a motivation for the team.
we are not working for the money here.

donations are about support and beeing thankful for what you get for free.
not to force soemone to get feature XY integrated.

thought about that yet?

 

[mrkrad]

yes but using a rar as a folder based on FUSE or whatever should be done at the o/s level not mediaportal level.

however if we stick to uncompressed unencrypted rar files couldn't HAALI consider this a type of wrapper and just unfold it like a .mkv file?? HAALI you out there? You're basically seeking the first file, then go play to end and then seek next file. There is no reason in the world to compress modern codecs. Plus i think here's the stinker. COPYRIGHTS. The rar format may include options which would be illegal to reverse engineer in their full commercial product. Kinda like how winzip has a proprietary compression mode that other deflaters can't use due to copyright/patents.

The reason they are rar'd into small pieces are simple, transport . torrent/ftp/newsgroups. The reason they are not compressed are doubly simple, the xbox1 barely meets the power to decode them on the fly, since you can setup FTP or Bittorrent to download the first few files you can start watching without needing the rest of the files. If any bits are missing, the codec skips and you get the trippy effects. Why would i want to wait for the 50th rar file to start playing(compressed) that would suck. I want to start downloading my LEGAL videos and play them as soon as i have enough to keep it streaming. That is the sole reason uncompressed RAR files are around.

I believe it takes more cpu cycles to split the audio and video than it would be to open a directory structure of rar and select and play but i do think this needs (and has been done already in 2005 in japan) be at the file system level.

Seriously windows XP SP2 has this feature so does 2003 for ZIP. I've asked all the poweriso/winmount folks why not pure shell integration (on/off of course) so everythings a folder.

If VLC and XBMC (source is free!) and Zoomplayer can do it, there's gotta be a way to do it. but i strongly disagree with it being part of media portal since you choose not to do virtual filesystems.

I'll throw $50 you have my word. I suggest doing it not as a hook or vmount but on the filesystem level and let mediaportal (.bat file?) engage and disengage it. So i can rar up my blu-ray personal backups or HD-dVD personal backups for off-site storage in case of tornado or hurricane and play them

I'm Serial.

 

[shacknasty]

$20 from me when folders with a rar span inside show up as a playable file in my videos

 

[mrkrad]

Someone try this. On XP then Vista. Of course since its old and from japan i'd suggest a VM

http://www.vmiao.com/vmiao1230/200510/13_214954_rarfs.zip

 

[zukex]

I tested that on vista (without media portal) and it worked... sort of... it does extract the whole thing before using the file (even with stored rars) to users temp folder, but it did delete the extracted file after i had watched it (at least on one occasion, the first time i tried it it didn't delete the avi)

edit: can't test on media portal since htpc's gpu hasn't arrived
... overall it's good, extracting 350mb is fairly fast, if it works in media portal i'd be happy with this even though it extracts the whole thing

 

[mrkrad]

hmm well that stinks i guess. i have winmount maybe i'll see if the developers will let us add hooks for something like that. honestly HAALI should be able to do non-compressed rar files (the compression is where copyrights get touchy).

 

[zukex]

of course we could try mailing rarFS author about better stored rar support, his email(s) were on the readme

edit: i will email him actually

 

[mrkrad]

yeah the other option would be a samba server (win32 or linux) that emulates rarfs using the FUSE libraries. but honestly for real i cant imagine that an uncompressed multi-part rar file is that hard to figure out.

check out sourceforge maybe we can hack someone elses work to integrate it like the xbmc folks did:
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=rar