How in the Tech

Play Video Content Contained in Rar Archives

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 29, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Multimedia

If you are a frequent downloader of videos, legal or not, you are likely familiar with the .rar file extension. Historically, large files meant for circulation on the Internet are broken down into smaller chunks of data and wrapped into individual files using the .rar file format. Smaller files lead to an easier ability to download; you’ll have to remember that this practice came into popularity when network connections were notoriously flaky. Additionally, large files were broken down to floppy disk sized chunks – easy portability right? Rar is the defacto standard because of it’s efficiency in breaking large files into smaller chunks and it’s ability to combat corruption by having blocks of redundancy.

The rationale is all well and good but at the end of it all the practice is just adding another layer between you and the content you are after. In order to reconstruct the video file you must unrar the entire set of rar files, only then is playback possible. But what if it was possible to skip that step entirely?

Rar File Source is the answer to the annoyance. Rar File Source is actually not a media player but rather a Direct Show filter. What this means is that it is a system wide plugin that enables .rar playback with your tried and true media player. With Rar File Source installed, select the .rar file through your media player interface. Everything else happens automatically for you behind the scenes.

Rar File Source is free and available for Windows however there are two requirements. You must have Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package installed and more importantly, the .rar files cannot be compressed. In practice, this second requirement is as much of a deal breaker as it initially seems – most downloads aren’t compressed anyways as video content isn’t easily compressible.