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VLC UnRAR plugin release 20080921, VLC 0.9.2

fli — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:52:52 +0000

It took a bit longer than I expected to prepare these builds, partly because of some obscure bugs that took quite some time to track down. Anyway, here it is a brand new release of the VLC UnRAR plugin that carries several bug fixes and optimizations and adds support for the newly released VLC 0.9.2

VLC 0.9.2 compatible binaries are available for

Windows XP 32-bit (does it work with Vista or XP 64-bit?)
Mac OS X PPC 10.4 (or higher) *
Linux 2.6.x (glibc 2.7)
FreeBSD i386 7.0/8.0

Source code is of course also available if anyone is crazy enough to try to compile this

* Unfortunally there are no Mac OS X Intel binary available simply because I don’t have any way to build it. My cross-compiling attempts failed in some quite spectacular ways, vmware+mac os x failed becuase my windows box don’t have PAE support. So, If anyone can supply me with a shell on a machine with Mac OS X 10.5 (Intel) and Xcode 2.5 installed I’ll do an Intel build.

Guide: How to get a RAR Player

fli — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:12:08 +0000

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

VLC UnRAR plugin release 20080811

fli — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:02:38 +0000

New release of the VLC UnRAR plugin that turns VLC into a RAR player.

This version have the following new features

RAR archived DVD images
Automatic installer (windows and unix)

This means that it’s possible to play DVDR movie scene releases directly with VLC without the need to first extract the DVD image.

You can grab the new release from the VLC UnRAR plugin page!

Sorry, there is still no Mac OS X version. There will be one for VLC 0.9.0, which should be released this month or so.

VLC UnRAR plugin

fli — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:44:11 +0000

I’ve hacked together a plugin to VLC that allows streaming (and seeking) of video files directly from (multi volume) RAR archives without the need to manually unpack them. Pre-compiled binaries and source code are available at the VLC UnRAR page.

Enjoy!