skip to the end if you just want to read the question

my xbox with xbmc died this weekend so to take my mind off things (and to solve the impending problem of having nothing to watch in the front room) i decided to cobble one of my old pc's together and stick it in there.

it looks suprisingly nice & crisp on the tv using a vga cable... 13xx by 768 i think

anyway, the only problem is that we stream all the video from my pc up here and its mostly rar'd. unpacking everytime is a pain in the arse... ive googled and tried the plugins which are supposed to do it but i cant figure it out...




so noob question: can anyone point me to the a) correct version of mplayer and/or b) the correct plugin or build that i need to play from rar files on a pc.

cheers
wanksock


edit: was supposed to be in the newbies forum... says a lot

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I know its not mplayer, but VLC should stream rar files (i think as i've never tried it) over a network......looky here

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quote:

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Originally posted by antihero
I know its not mplayer, but VLC should stream rar files (i think as i've never tried it) over a network......looky here

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that page makes no reference to rar i dont want to transcode the stream or anything like that...

i can do it with vlc using vlcraar.exe and unrar.exe but it wont allow me to seek through the video... (a limitation of the plugin, not the fact iam streaming from another pc) i just have to watch from beginning to end, which is ok most of the time but not ideal.

i think xbmc for the xbox1 uses some build of mplayer, and you could seek with that... so im hoping there is an easy solution for mplayer on a desktop too.

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This program claims to be able to do it (based on MPlayer).

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i'll give it a go, although im sure i read somewhere that it hadnt been updated since around 2004.

cheers though, i'll try it out.

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Oddly enough, I'd recommend NZBPlayer... It's not only for Usenet downloads, it'll happily open/play a rar set even when it's still downloading, just make sure you download the rars in the correct order. It uses VLC as an external player and as far as I can tell it "fakes" the remainder of the file so that VLC will at least open it and start playing it, and then it extracts and appends the next rar file into the avi file (I'm hoping that makes sense).

Another alternative is just to set your download client (wherever you download from) to auto-extract your downloads. I know Alt.Binz will do this for newsgroups and uTorrent the same with torrents.

So yeah, don't extract em and play em as they download or set your client to auto-extract.

See bitches... Just ask Neversoft

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I've not tried it with RAR sets, but the feature set of KMPlayer is excellent, and I've replaced VLC with it full time. Not to be confused with the KDE Media Player.

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yup makes perfect sense, cheers... ill give nzbplayer a whirl this evening

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Am I missing something here?

Extracting a 4.5GB movie takes 5 mins on my old heap of shit PC.

Just go for a wank while it's extracting, plenty of time to shoot your load wash your hands and return to PC.

Last edited by takwhori on 05-22-2008 at 09:07 PM

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quote:

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Originally posted by takwhori
Am I missing something here?

Extracting a 4.5GB movie takes 5 mins on my old heap of shit PC.

Just go for a wank while it's extracting, plenty of time to shoot your load wash your hands and return to PC.

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Bump.

http://www.v12pwr.com/RARFileSource/

Should allow any DirectShow-based player to play RARs without unpacking.

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