Question: I am having major problems with all the .RAR files I download. Many titles consist of more than one part, so I have been downloading all three parts, for example, and each part seems to be the same size. The files are compressed files and I can open them OK with WinZip. I start with part 1, unzip it, and then launch it to watch the video.
The first problem arises when I need to stop, say, after 20 minutes into the file and close it. Later on, I cannot return to the file and reopen it; the message I get is asking me to insert the named disc into a disc drive, and of course I don’t have any discs for these files I downloaded directly from the net. As a result, I cannot view the rest of the video file. Why is this??
The second problem is that the other two parts are the same size as part 1, yet when I unzip them, there is nothing shown is the resulting window, EVEN THOUGH the downloaded file size is the same for these files as for part one. This seems like an extreme waste of time and I would like to know if I am doing anything wrong and for someone to help me if I am.
Answer: RAR is a little different from ZIP in that a RAR archive usually consists of multiple segments. If you want to extract the contents of a RAR archive intact, then you need to first collect all the segments. Then you can use the RAR decoder in SuperNZB to do the extraction.
If a RAR file contains video, then you can often just feed the raw data into a video player and watch it. However, that is not how the RAR format was designed to work. If you collect all the segments, and then do the extraction, you will likely find that the RAR archive contains a normal video file, such as an AVI.