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Support for media in rar-archives


korvgryta

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I do not think it could be clearer..... The discussion in this thread is of mb inability to play media from rar which is a real shortcumming and as such i am just highlighting a possible shortcut. This for circumventing the obvious negativity against doing this in the native mb player. Mb is nice but as long as it misses similar features of kodi it will never rise to the same popularity.

 

Many ppl go as far as saying. Unpack them or stop getting RAR. Its like saying why download at all why not stop all local file support all together since you can stream?

 

This is not about how you prepare or get your content, its merely a feature to support the obvious abstraction of what happens on the computerpart. Throw anything in and play, one shall not need to prepare content before watching in such case MB has failed its purpose and we can all go after simple streaming services.

 

I hope you get the point now!

 

In simple terms. MB should prepare and present the content to the user not the other way around.

 

This is the best answer on why this feature is something that would be considered.

Edited by argit
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you guys are welcome to help you know :) pull requests are encour

 

I would like to if I had the knowledge. I would be a burden than a asset in coding :( Im always up for testing.

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  • 1 month later...

I really would like to see this feature so I have posted a bounty for the request, I hope the Emby team or someone with the right knowledge will pick up this request.

 

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/30765863-feature-request-support-for-media-in-rar-archives

 

I encourage anyone else that wants this feature request to become a reality to do the same.

Edited by gardar
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  • 7 months later...
superture

Now I remember why I didn't continued with Emby... Deal breaker I'm afraid.

 

Pity when Emby has almost everything else I'd like.

 

Kind regards

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@@superture there's just not enough people that want this. That makes it hard for us to dedicate time and resources towards it. If that changes and suddenly demand increases, then certainly we will reconsider.

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superture

@@superture there's just not enough people that want this. That makes it hard for us to dedicate time and resources towards it. If that changes and suddenly demand increases, then certainly we will reconsider.

Yes I've read the thread and get your view on the matter. No worries.

 

I do think you guys underestimate peoples willingness to post in this thread to maybe get a feature instead of just giving up and go elseware.

 

And I REALLY think you have underestimated the userbase you would open up to with this feature!

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argit

I'm still waiting for this feature.

 

I will keep following this post, this post is the 4th most viewed post in category feature request. Thats something I guess.

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gardar

Yes I've read the thread and get your view on the matter. No worries.

 

I do think you guys underestimate peoples willingness to post in this thread to maybe get a feature instead of just giving up and go elseware.

 

And I REALLY think you have underestimated the userbase you would open up to with this feature!

 

 

I'm still waiting for this feature.

 

I will keep following this post, this post is the 4th most viewed post in category feature request. Thats something I guess.

 

I encourage you guys and everyone else to post a bounty for this feature and show the Emby devs we are serious.

 

I know it's not guaranteed to get results but I think it is more effective than just lurking/posting on the forum. Ofcourse it would be best if someone with the time and programming skills would contribute and make this feature a reality (you can even claim the bounty if you contribute).

 

But for us that don't have the time/knowledge I feel posting a bounty might be our best bet.

 

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/30765863-feature-request-support-for-media-in-rar-archives

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  • 1 month later...
gardar

We've got a dev that posted a 250$ goal few days ago so I just increased my posted bounty so we'd reach that goal. :)

 

Let's cross our fingers that work will begin soon on this.

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  • 7 months later...
abescalamis

I could be wrong but isn't there a trade-off when supporting this? by that I mean uncompressing a rar and streaming at the same time uses more hardware resources and the streaming might not be optimal? as far as my understanding is, streaming an uncompressed video will be less heavy for the hardware? but probably the ones asking for this run emby server on a very powerful PC's, if the PC is not powerful the "video stream' will stutter a lot

 

Kodi streams locally (LAN) and that makes it work better with rar files, but when you stream through the internet like emby does is a totally different story and the quality of the stream will be crappy.

 

Imagine streaming a rar movie encoded using x265 10bit, will use a lot of resources and I'm wondering if it would be even watchable, now imagine a couple of user conected wile streaming this file.

 

But like I said I could be wrong I'm just saying.

Edited by abescalamis
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I could be wrong but isn't there a trade-off when supporting this? by that I mean uncompressing a rar and streaming at the same time uses more hardware resources and the streaming might not be optimal? as far as my understanding is, streaming an uncompressed video will be less heavy for the hardware? but probably the ones asking for this run emby on powerful PC's.

 

But like I said I could be wrong I'm just saying.

 

Yes that's what we've been saying this whole time more or less.

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gardar

You have the wrong idea, nobody is talking about extracting any rar files.

What we are requesting is a native playback of uncompressed rar archives.

 

This can for example be done by mounting the rar files and then reading the media files within and is in fact already possible through several applications, for example Kodi, mpv, rar2fs

 

Kodi mounts the rar files and does not extract any rars unless they are compressed.

rar2fs mounts the rar files and can even mount compressed rars but can only seek in uncompressed rars.

I'm assuming mpv mounts the rars as well, I'm not sure how/if it handles compressed rars.

 

Doesn't Emby support playing iso files? I'm assuming that's done by mounting the iso and not extracting it. This would be the same approach.

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Thanks for the info, and yes that knowledge makes things easier. Is it always one file per archive?

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gardar

No problem, glad to be of assistance.

 

Yes always one file per archive, but the rar files are usually a split-archive.

 

I just took a quick look at mpv and I see they are just borrowing a code from VLC (didn't know vlc could play rars).

 

You can see the initial rar support they added in this commit:

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/3fc3bf70f972f4e68258193f0f9c70ee6b85be5e

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  • 7 months later...

Hi,

 

I'm reading this forum since several years, and most of the time about the topic "how to play rar files" (and I know, you don't support this or maybe not for now). I won't do the pros/cons between Emby/Kodi/VLC/... ; i think everyone knows what can do both ; but you wrote on another post (in another topic i don't remember) that if we want that feature, we all have to say it.

 

@@kilroy82 wrote it too 2 months ago and i agree with him : people don't create an account just to say "hey, i want it too". They just do like i did, read the forum, follow the situation and wait and/or keep using their video player. I'm pretty sure everyone do that. So I created an account today just to say that i would be very interested too. I know your product since i tried it (as Plex, ...) and it's the one i would pay with pleasure (regarding your lifetime subscription) ; it just lacks a must-have feature i need ("rar-file") and because Kodi has this since long long time, i never unpack/sort/... anything, it was able to play anything from any format.

 

In the end, i appreciate your work, your app is really nice and great to use when i tested it (i did it again with the latest version). But I would really appreciate to see that rar-file feature supported, and if you need anything for that (info / help / beta test / bounty value / ...), i would be happy to join it.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hello! 

 

I am new to the forum and Emby. I have not tried it yet, I have been using Kodi for years. A friend of mine tipped me about the project and I was a bit disappointed to see that there is no .rar playback support. I would therefore like to add my vote to this request. I can also confirm that we are talking about uncompressed multi rar files with one media file content inside the rars. The server/client feature of Emby is very interesting and I would like to try it, but will anxiously await the rar support. Hope to see it soon :)

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  • 1 month later...

Extracting files from zip/rar is pretty easy in itself, however it does take time.  There is overhead on the time it takes.  This can cause timeouts for players as they won't start receiving data as they would expect.

 

Direct play with UNC won't be possible unless each client is also changed to be able to read the zip/rars.

 

There are lots of components in Emby itself that will need to be changed.  BIF (Roku Images) plugin for example will need to be modified to read the data in the rars.  FFprobing will need changing, Index Chapters, etc.  Lots of independent parts of Emby will need to become ZIP/RAR aware to continue to function properly.

 

Those types of things are easily fixed/added with time and dev resources.  However to me what is a bigger issue is going to be the internal structure of these files and the names used.  We get plenty enough posts in the forums with bad file names or sub folders used wrongly that cause matching issues.  This will skyrocket with an implementation to use zip/rars as the expectation is going to be that the files can't change and thus Emby must adapt to matching the file names in these zip/rar files.

 

I'd highly suggest to get some samples of the naming and contents of the files to see what impact this will have with identification of the media.

 

There will be a lot of obstacles and just pulling the media from the zip.rar is not one of them as this is trivial.

 

Plex sort of had this functionality but something was always breaking or causing problems and the naming/matching was a significant contributor.  The man hours of programming, upkeep and ongoing design just wasn't worth it considering how many people actually used it which was very low.

Edited by cayars
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thelanranger

I'm not going to go over all the reasons why this should be supported...pretty much everyone touched on it here. But VLC and Kodi play rar files, you guys should try to play everything they play. 

 

The end game should be that the user shouldn't have to do a bunch of gymnastics to setup the program. This is just one less hoop the user has to jump through to do something they can do with a double click on their phone/computer/xbox as it is.

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