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Comment by cloudjacker | Hacker News Reader

hey there! One feature that XBMC (now called Kodi) had since 2004 but I haven't seen anywhere else, is the ability to play the contents of rar files.

So you could download movies and never have to bother unzipping them.

It worked for multipart rars too.

The lore is that they implemented a custom rar algorithm but anyway, that was 14 years ago and its an open source project so I should see this somewhere else by now!

Since you guys are doing something over the torrent network where these kind of video releases are common (multipart rar, reminiscent of the release group's newsgroup roots), could you implement this functionality too:

When streaming, discover the sequence of the rar files in the torrent, prioritize the file downloads by rar number, and play the video file within?

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A bit of an aside, but for anyone who thinks this sort of thing is technically cool, Free Download Manager will let you look inside a remote ZIP file (of any size) and let you pick the files you want to download. Relatively simple to implement, but cute. It's the only open-source download manager offering this, I think.

(http://freedownloadmanager.org/ is a bit Softonic-esque, probably because of the program's heritage; the code's over at https://sourceforge.net/p/freedownload/code/HEAD/tree/trunc/, last checkin 2 weeks ago - and the project description says "we also plan to port it to Linux/OS X," which is cool)

I believe this can be achieved via a combination of httpfs [1] and archivemount [2]. Not sure about the reliability, but I think the approach is more general - you could even stream from within a remote archive this way, using whatever program you wanted. The job of an archive reader, disk reader, or "server reader" should be to translate these things into the filesystem so that all programs benefit. GNU Hurd took this approach, with the native ability to mount tarballs and FTP servers as filesystems, and POP3 as an mbox file.

Incidentally, I can't find any archives with audio hosted on a server that supports Accept-Ranges on the open web. I'd appreciate a link if anyone finds one.

Update: AVFS [3] seems to be an all-in-one solution that handles HTTP, FTP, WebDAV, Zip/RAR/Bzip, SSH, and others. Also see "podfuk" [4], though it looks pretty ancient.

[1] http://httpfs.sourceforge.net/ [2] http://www.cybernoia.de/software/archivemount/ [3] http://avf.sourceforge.net/ [4] http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~machek/podfuk/podfuk.html

I've implemented the same thing in a Usenet/NZB streaming project a few years ago - it's actually trivial since the multi-part rars are uncompressed, so the raw bytes of inner-content are there ready to be read. Just have to handle RAR headers/trailers. Seeking worked too since Usenet posts were commonly made up of 700kb posts, so if a seek occurred, you prioritize retrieving the required posts where the user seeked to, to fill the media player buffer. Code has never been released for obvious reasons :)

multipart rars are uncompressed? this whole time? my whole world is shattered right now

This is an incredibly niche feature today because no releases come packaged in archives. Furthermore, to my knowledge you can't really "stream" archives.

They still do come packaged directly from scene releases. Smaller private torrent trackers have these releases. Public trackers usually contain just the media files so people don't have to unzip. But I agree, playing from archives would be a great feature.

I'd say the majority still are split into rars for the initial scene release but by the time it comes to the public trackers, and even many private trackers, someone has already unrared it for you.

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