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Comment by racingmars | Hacker News Reader

RAR is a proprietary format... there is no free-software code to decompress RAR archives (the license agreement for the code that is available prohibits using the code to 'reverse engineer' the RAR format itself, and I'm guessing most projects don't want to have to change their license agreement to a non-free-software license to be able to include RAR support).

Not sure why anyone actually uses RAR these days...I really don't get it.

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I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or continue using Kodi which is my current solution.

I don't think the license is the issue, Kodi has solved it with a external dep if i'm not mistaken. The reason is more related to your last sentence. They don't get it, and thus doesn't want to spend time on solving it. Which is their prerogative of course, but it still annoys _me_ :)

> I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or continue using Kodi which is my current solution.

I don't understand why you'd want to keep media files in .rar, unless you are part of scene distribution.

It's not like ROM emulation, where there's tangible savings to be had storing the individual ROMs in a compressed format.

Well, for the longest time, like a decade+, there was no point to spend the time unpacking the files. I could watch them with unrar| mplayer without any problems. Then XBMC came along and everything continued to work without a hitch, it isn't until now the need to unpack them has actually presented itself so i of course see this as a step back and degradation in my personal user experience.

But i guess times are changing, kids these days etc. :)

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