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This guide will show you how to get a RAR Player that plays movies directly from RAR archives without the need to first extract them. We’ll be using Windows in this guide but it works with other operating systems too.

Step 1

Go to http://www.videolan.org and download the media player VLC. It’s free and open source. For Windows, download the file vlc-X.X.X-win32.exe (for example vlc-0.9.2-win32.exe). Run this file, it’s an installer and will guide you through the installation of VLC.

You can of course skip this step if you already have VLC installed.

Step 2

Now, when we have VLC working we’ll need to install a plugin that handles RAR archives and thus turns VLC into a RAR Player. Go to http://www.shapeshifter.se/code/vlc-unrar/ and download the most recent version (just hit the big download button). The file should be named something similar to vlc-unrar-0.X.X-200ymmdd-win32.exe (for example vlc-unrar-0.9.8a-20090307-win32.exe). Download the version that closest match your VLC version. You can usually safely use a slightly newer VLC version without problems.

Step 3

Run the vlc-unrar-0.x.x-200ymmdd-win32.exe file, it will launch an installer that guides you through the installation of the plugin.

Setup screen for the VLC UnRAR plugin

The setup screen allows you to select and de-select components. The UnRAR plugin is the default plugin and allows movies (AVI, MKV, etc) to be played directly from RAR archives. The UnRAR DVD plugin allows you to watch RAR archived DVD images (DVDR releases). If you want both just click Install.

Step 4

The default plugin (UnRAR plugin) must be activated before it can be used, the DVD plugin is activated directly.

Launch VLC, then go to the Tools menu and select Preferences

Select Preferences from the Tools menu

Click “All” in the bottom left corner. Navigate to Input/Codecs and select Access filters, check the box that says “UnRAR”. Click Save.

Activate the UnRAR access filter

That’s it, you have now turned VLC into a RAR Player, simply open the first volume in the archive as any normal video file.

The RAR player in action

What’s a guide without some success screenshots. These are from VLC 0.8.x

To open a movie, select the first volume in the archive, it’s usually named .rar, .r00, part01.rar or part001.rar

Open a RAR archived movie

You can seek and pause as with any other normal video file.

Shows the VLC UnRAR plugin in action

The UnRAR DVD plugin in action, the first screenshot shows the DVD menu and the second playback. This is directly from a DVD image inside a RAR archive.

VLC UnRAR DVD plugin at DVD menu screen

VLC DVD UnRAR plugin in action

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.