Unarchiver Provides LGPL RARv3 Extraction Tool 183
An anonymous reader writes "Free software to support the RARv3 archive format has been listed on the FSF's High Priority Projects list for some time now. We've always had ways to create and extract free archive formats, using tools like GNU tar and Info-ZIP. The RARv3 format is proprietary, so we don't want it to replace these tools, but it's not uncommon to see it used for distributing multimedia files over the Internet. That means the lack of free software to extract RARv3 files has been sorely felt. We're happy to share the news that there's now a free software project to fill this gap, and we can mark this item as done. The Unarchiver is a small collection of software written by Dag Ågren."
Seems like the distributor needs to be slapped (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe because it's the best tool for your job? Politics isn't the only reason to pick your software. Or maybe someone has to deal with files from *gasp* someone else!
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The closed source and payware distributors use executable installers. The Linux community uses tar, compressed using gzip, bzip, or lzma. The legitimate Windows community uses WinZip (because they don't know otherwise) or 7-Zip (because it's free). The hugely overwhelming use of WinRar is just to split files for distribution on antiquated mediums like FTP and Usenet, which don't natively support multi-part uploads and downloads, and have file size limits. Since this is generally multimedia content that
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I find RAR files all the time, even small ones used for small files.
Lots of people just use RAR because they have WinRar (usually pirated) and its seen as "better"
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But 7zip can decompress rar files.
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The plug-in/add-on that allows 7z to decompress rar v3 is not free (as in freedom) software.
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my power to dominate their puny, weak minds with my glowing neon brain-waves, and force them to resend it as a .tar.xz only works in person
My experience is different. I manage to get people to cooperate once I explain politely that I lack software to read the file and ask to resend in Zip or 7-Zip format.
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And also, isn't there optional redundancy in split rar files ? i.e. if you compress a (set of) file(s) into several split rars and you loose one or two of them you can still decompress the original file(s). Very convenient when archiving on CDs or, cough, cough, Usenet.
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Maybe because it's the best tool for your job?
Since when is rar the best format for any job? I swear that you pirates are completely ignorant. Your obsession with rar is a self destructive cycle that will forever have you passing around significantly larger files than necessary.
1995 called and it wants its inefficient proprietary archive format back.
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because most PC users, when faced with a .7z file, will download winrar.
and when that happens, it's extra effort for bugger-all (none?) extra compression to make your own archives in 7z. so they end up in rar by default.
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Odd. I don't understand why people even use RAR anymore when there's 7z. I don't see this horde of clueless users dying for shredded archiving. And as far as I know, RAR isn't this gratifying user experience.
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...except you don't have to worry about whether or not your car or some cheap player from China supports rar.
A "pirate media" format can change whenever the packagers fancy changes. It doesn't have to be set in stone.
You don't use ARC any more do you? So obviously change is possible in this area.
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the one time i tried a 7z only client (i presume the one made by the 7z people), it sucked badly.
you don't know how often you use shell integration until you lose it, or have to manually add it back in.
it's probably much better now, but i wouldn't know because it's so much quicker to install winrar.
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Except Winrar isn't free (in any sense). The shell integration has been part of the installation options in 7-zip for years now. If you don't have a need to create rar archives, only open them. there really is no reason to give Rarlab your money or make it a pirated piece of software on your system.
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Except Winrar isn't free (in any sense).
It's free in the sense that you can download a fully functional copy from the developers website. You are supposed to register it after a trial period but the devs don't actually make any significant attempt to enforce that.
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How long ago was this? (Score:4, Insightful)
the one time i tried a 7z only client
How long ago was this? When I switched to 7-Zip nearly four years ago, it already had the same sort of shell integration that WinRAR had.
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(Plus the 7Z package is open-source, so it's widely available.)
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I think you presumed wrong. 7-zip file manager has had that feature for a loooooong time.
http://www.7-zip.org/ [7-zip.org] is the official 7-zip distribution site. If you get it from elsewhere, good luck.
The client is plain, straightforward and easy to set up, and it can decompress many compression formats (including RAR).
Full Windows shell integration built in.
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BBSes kept using ZIP well after RAR came out because they had scripts that would embed their taglines into the ZIP files that passed through their board, thus incriminating the owners in criminal copyright infringement. I'm not sure why this was considered to be a feature, but it was and probably still is. However, the scripts were eventually updated to support RAR which was carried through the society because the boards were run by nerds or kiddies who wanted to think they were nerds and both groups are wi
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Odd. I don't understand why people even use RAR anymore when there's 7z.
Because 7zip is kind of crap really. Not only is it quite slow, it also has absolutely no redundancy or recovery build in what so ever. A single flipped bit will quite literally destroy your whole archive, same with an incomplete 7zip that is missing some bytes at the end. RAR on the other side doesn't mind a flipped bit, with build in recovery data it can fix that and even without it that data will only affect a single file, all the other files and what is left of the damaged file can be extracted without
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I would rate WinRAR's GUI as being a bit nicer than 7z.
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http://www.compression.ca/act/act-win.html [compression.ca]
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Why would you use a proprietary format to store openly distributed files?
More to the point, why would I care as long as I can open said file?
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Its like storing your photos in gif format just because those files are smaller than bmp, completely ignoring the fact that both of those options are shitty inferior choices.
The fact that rar is not only a shitty inferior choice, but also a proprietary one, makes the gif analogy perfect.
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Why would you ever choose an inferior technology like rar?
Citation needed. Google searches seem to conclude that RARv3 is bested only by 7-zip and then only enough to make the difference completely irrelevant in the real world.
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Many possible reasons.
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Because a lot of sysadmins didn't think to install an unRAR plugin for ClamAV on the mailserver. If you can put lindsaynaked.jpg.exe inside a RAR file so that it doesn't get scanned, then there's a better chance of getting it onto the corporate LAN.
Re:Seems like the distributor needs to be slapped (Score:5, Funny)
Because, you see, some children have two daddies or two mommies instead of a mommy and daddy.
And sometimes, nerds like to watch movies where both mommies and both daddys are in the same room giving each other special hugs. But they like to watch them for free, so they wind up downloading the movie as a 50 part .RAR file.
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So why not use one of the many other open formats that support multi-part checksummed files
If you're downloading the file, chances are you didn't create it.
or pirate WinRar just like they did the porn.
That's what everyone did. Well, actually they don't need to pirate in the usual sense of the word, you can download it from the developers' site, but you're supposed to stop using it after 40 days.
They're actually pretty nice, the software doesn't stop working, the GUI version just starts nagging you and the CLI doesn't say anything at all.
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And sometimes, nerds like to watch movies where both mommies and both daddys are in the same room giving each other special hugs. But they like to watch them for free, so they wind up downloading the movie as a 50 part .RAR file.
Just wait till you get to the ones with two daddies and two mommies and everyone is getting special hugs. That's when it gets kinda juicy.
Yeah, but I gotta draw the line at 50 daddies and one mommy.
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You gotta draw the line much earlier than that (if you want an orderly procession).
Excellent! (Score:2, Funny)
Finally there is a Richard Stallman approved way of extracting my pirated pornography, movies and TV shows on my Linux box.
Using a proprietary tool on an OSS system is so unethical...
Re:Excellent! (Score:4, Interesting)
What about Creative Commons licensed porn?
http://www.freedomporn.org/ [freedomporn.org]
The mission of Freedom Porn is to empower and engage individuals to create and share ethical porn as a means of advancing sex-positivism and sexual freedom.
We advocate safer sex and consensual sex, and feminism is inseparable from our mission. We also fight for freedom of speech, privacy, and free culture. As such, we are the world's first porn repository of entirely free cultural works. All videos are in free formats, either WebM or Ogg Theora, and we encourage the use of free software. We run on donations, so please contribute!
There are already "free" unrar apps (Score:4, Informative)
RAR is pretty much the default foprmat on Usenet binary groups, for instance.
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Now that there is LGPL code that can decompress RAR files (code that is presumably untainted by the restrictions on the "unrar" code used by most archivers to uncompress RAR files) someone can use that code as a reference for how the compression works.
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It would be fairly easy to write that. Getting it to be as efficient as the original rar archiver might be tricky, but basic compression is about as easy as it is for zlib's Deflate.
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The main problem with the implementations that are available seems to be that they are very slow for larger files split across multiple rar files. I even remember reading some posting about this somewhere where the gist of the message was "the portable *nix version of rar/unrar was developed to be portable, not efficient. Try using the Windows version if you think it's too slow.".
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There is an OSS version (unrar-free), which only decompresses RARv1&2. Only the non-free package (unrar) can decompress RARv3 files.
I remember... (Score:2)
The Unarchiver (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll put in a big thanks for The Unarchiver.
I deploy it as my standard unarchiving utility on all desktops I manage. It replaces the Mac OS X built-in BOMArchiveHelper which isn't as smart about handling extracting multiple files at once, and it handles a vast range of file formats that you'd otherwise have to resort to the command-line to deal with. News of it adding RARv3 is the icing on the cake - not that I've encountered a RARv3 file, but because now I don't need to worry if I do as my standard utility will deal with it.
Big double-thumbs up to Dag Ågren. Cheers.
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Indeed. I discovered this amazing gem of a tool a couple years ago and I've loved it ever since. I've been familiarizing myself with the source lately with the intent of implementing a FUSE filesystem layer for at least viewing archives. Glad to see TU is getting a decent amount of attention.
Thank you for the tip... Amiga formats, too (Score:2)
The fact it is open source, and deals with rars, and almost every other archive well is an added bonus!
Of course, huge thanks to the author. Donation on its way.
Already had source code (Score:3, Informative)
OK, it's no GPL, but still I'd say that it puts "open source" RAR support in a better position than other high priority GNU projects such as Flash support, where your only chance to have a good experience is to use binary-only code.
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People using it are capping/ripping video that they don't own copyright to, and there's no need to split the file into small chunks now bittorrent is used. Useness for binaries is all but dead. Torrents have built in error checking, so the need for parts and recovery is redundant in the process.
Torrents are really yesterday's news at this point. Uploaders have moved to filehosts like FileServe, Oron, et al because they can make money uploading content and because you can upload many more files when you rely on a third party to do the heavy lifting of distribution. It's just icing on the cake that the legal authorities focus on torrent sites while allowing filehosts to operate in the free and clear, despite the fact that the commercial, direct distribution nature of filehosts really ought to make
Most distro's already include unrar don't they? (Score:3)
On the 2 distros I've used most in the last 8 years (Mandriva and Opensuse) unrar is already included (in Mandriva from the PLF repo, in Opensuse from the non-oss repo). So what's the advantage of this new program?
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UnRAR is a binary. This is why it's in the non-oss repo in Opensuse. The advantage is that this one is under an open source license.
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unrar is by rarlab, the same company that makes winrar and is run by Alexander Roshal - and licences the format from Eugene Roshal, who invented it. It's shareware, and can only decompress files, not create them. Rar and winrar, that can create archives, are closed source.
This one is open source, and thus can be incorporated more easily into other open source apps for extraction of the current v3 of rar files; previously, unrarlib could do v1 and v2, but not v3.
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It really depends on the "unrar" that you are comparing it to and how much you care about using open software.
GNA unrar is based off of an old version of RARLAB unrar, and does not support RARv3. It is GPL licensed.
RARLAB unrar, while the source is provided, has restrictions preventing it from being considered "open". One of these restrictions is that it cannot be studied to recreate the RAR compression algorithm.
Since this new implementation is open, the code could be studied to make an open source applica
Irony (Score:2)
So now we have free (libre) software for extracting RAR files. Great ! You just need to run it on a proprietary operating system ...
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The command-line version runs on Linux, OS X and Windows. Probably on BSDs too, but I have not been able to test this.
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It's definitely not an FSF project, but it does run on various platforms, including Linux.
Re:Yay piracy! (Score:5, Informative)
Compressing my HD rip to save 5MB on a 50GB download!
In the case of movies, it's not so much that it saves space, it's more that it breaks the large file up into more manageable chunks and it also gives you checksums to know if something got corrupted.
This isn't particularly important for distribution methods like bittorrent which provides it's own checksums and doesn't have problems with files over 2 or 4 GB, but for some other distribution methods it does make a big difference, especially when you throw par2 files into the mix for correcting problems.
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There are perfectly cromulent tools for that without rar: you can just split a file with split and compute "checksums" with md5 and sha1.
It's of course completely unnecessary for BitTorrent, which has an excellent system for breaking files into pieces and hashing those pieces. In fact, you might as well make a system for piecing and hashing based on torrent metainfo files.
Re:Yay piracy! (Score:5, Insightful)
in unix, yes. in the windows world, there's only two levels of difficulty: drag-and-drop or impossible. most users have winzip or 7zip or whatever and pirates have traditionally favored rar. thus, the rar standard emerges and metastasizes so that programs like vlc support it natively. kind of silly, but it works.
if you want to cry, follow this link and count the number of shitty gui hacks that do nothing but "split" and "cat": http://www.google.com/search?q=split+file+windows [google.com]
Re:Yay piracy! (Score:5, Funny)
pirates have traditionally favored rar.
Your hearing may be faulty. Pirates have traditionally favored har and yarr!
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I'm sure Zip could do multipart archives -- that's how I used to transfer large files on Windows machines using only floppy disks.
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We used to do backups to multiple floppies with PKZIP, it was not pretty.
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if you want to cry, follow this link and count the number of shitty gui hacks that do nothing but "split" and "cat"
Oh lordy, if anything typifies the Windows ecosystem for me, this has to be it. I can't count how many posts I've seen on Usenet discussing where to find shiny software that essentially does nothing but "cat file.avi.* > file.avi". I'm sure that such a thing must be possible from the command line, but the majority of Windows users are afraid to venture there.
Oops (Score:2)
Oops - close quote on that first line.
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I'm sure that such a thing must be possible from the command line,
or, if you are a bit paranoid and want to guarantee append order, you can fall back to the original (DOS 3.x) syntax:
But yeah, most Windows users aren't even aware of command prompt. Being an ancient and crusty user of DOS (back to 2.0) makes me a 133t h@x0r, apparently.
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It goes even further than that - back when I was first getting into and understanding computers, I saw a bunch of warez on WinMX labelled as "packaged with Wrapster", stating you needed to go and download wrapster (which, I'm sure you're surprised, was 90% malware, 9% GUI and 1% features) to unpack them.
All wrapster did was chop off the .zip or whatever file extension and append .mp3 instead (since apparently you could only share MP3 files on napster), simply because default windows settings remove your abi
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In the windows world rar is one of those perfectly cromulent tools, why use something else when the current tool works just fine.
And given it's the piracy scene that the tool isn't free software is completely irrelevant.
I'm pretty sure BitTorrent isn't the primary mechanism of the initial distribution of pirated material. I guess maybe for the movie world where you don't need people who have learnt how to remove disk checks and other copy protection schemes and hence anyone can make the initial copy.
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You can't repair corrupted/missing archives with md5/sha1. The .rar format is perfect for usenet, where missing parts is very common.
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PAR is used more often on Usenet (or it was last time I looked, which is about 2-3 years ago).
PAR leaves the original file untouched, and creates extra redundant data based on it.
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Yes, but it's RAR + PAR, because this is another hack on top of a system never designed to do binaries. Long story short, any "large" file - originally 60kb and not much larger today - is split and transmitted as multipart binaries. This has nothing to do with RARs, every large file is that way. A lot of Usenet software won't download incomplete files because it means it should wait for more parts to arrive at the server. It doesn't know that with PAR files you actually have enough to recover the whole file
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Combine PAR2 + dd_rescue and as long as the disk isn't completely non-functional, you have good odds of recovering data (if you have enough repair blocks). Setting aside 5-15% of the disk capacity for recovery data is not a big deal in most situations and will prot
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So is a format where parts of the file can be missing and the rest will chug along just fine.
They use such formats for "broadcast". Being able to split and join them with "split" and "cat" and use the resulting fragments is a very handy thing.
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You can't, but there are perfectly normal and flexible tools for doing that, too.
MD5 and SHA1 are solely for detecting corrupted data (and also serve well as an index). You don't need to have a single tool do everything.
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There are perfectly cromulent tools for that without rar: you can just split a file with split and compute "checksums" with md5 and sha1.
RAR can not only have a checksum, but also optional redundancy, so that it can automatically fix a few flipped bits. RAR is also able to extract incomplete archives without problems unlike say 7zip where an incomplete archive becomes completely unusable. Unlike the gzip/tar mess RAR is also able to seek, thus you can extract the last file in the archive without first uncompressing, which is extremely useful when dealing with big archives. RAR also compresses extremely well.
Simply put, I haven't seen any oth
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Unlike the gzip/tar mess RAR is also able to seek, thus you can extract the last file in the archive without first uncompressing, which is extremely useful when dealing with big archives.
This is entirely dependent on how the archive was created. A "solid" archive offers better compression, but does not allow random access. Both 7z and rar support solid archive, the main difference is the default creation behavior: solid archives in 7z and non-solid in rar.
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Strange comments about 7zip being unable to deal with damange/incomplete archives because I was viewing/extracting single files from incomplete achives just a couple days ago. So long as the part is complete, 7zip can deal with it and no even WinRar doesn't deal well with >100 percent downloaded part because normally critical data is missing to even open the archive.
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For example, if I am writing to a tape drive, using an archive format with the index at the end is a *terrible* idea and much slower than tar or cpio.
Yeah, but so is using a linear storage archive format for a random access media. Tar certainly has its uses, but that it is used for distributing source code and other stuff on Unix systems is really nothing more then a historical accident, a proper format designed for that use would look very different.
The simple fact is that all the shiny modularity of combining tar, gzip, bzip, par, gpg, cat, split and whatever to reproduce rar's features still doesn't give you basic random access to the archive, somethi
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What it is good for is transforming the file into something that's not recognizable as the copyrighted material
Really? Given that no one other than pirates seems to use RAR, I'd have thought it was a red flag saying 'look, illegal stuff here!'
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Re:Yay piracy! (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with RAR files and Bittorrent is "scene snobbery". Basically, people reason that since all scene releases are released in RAR archives then all media distributed should be distributed as multi-file RAR archives. This can be seen on invite-only torrent sites that demand that all upload regardless of origin be split into multiple RAR files.
And should someone point out that it's really only when downloading files using FTP and other non-checksummed protocols that this is necessary then they will be screamed down by the know-nothings. And then there's the whole thing where they seem to insist on using 25 or 50 MB files instead of larger chunks. If you're grabbing files from an FTP/HTTP server dedicated to sharing these large media files chances are that the server is able to push the files to you faster than say, 10 Mbps, and we'll assume that's as fast as your connection is, that means you can grab a 250 MB file in approximately 3m30s if we assume no overhead, if we a assume you have a regular uncapped g.dmt ADSL connection (8/0.8 Mbps) with the typical EoATM and TCP overhead for your transfers then we're still talking less than five minutes for a 250 MB chunk. Contrast this with people splitting things into 5 or 10 MB chunks back when a lot of people were still on modem connections, a single 5 MB chunk would take more than ten minutes on a good day...
Re:Yay piracy! (Score:4, Insightful)
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No matter how much you whine and get all "high and mighty" and "snooty" about it, it's really hard to argue against a 10x improvement in encoding speed when the target device doesn't really benefit from any of the "advantages" of the more computationally complex format.
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The advantage of splitting into small files is that its easier to upload the content to hosting services like Rapidshare, Megaupload etc etc etc.
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In the case of movies, it's not so much that it saves space, it's more that it breaks the large file up into more manageable chunks and it also gives you checksums to know if something got corrupted.
But we already have things for that which do it better. Bundled checksum files in the normal SFV, MD5, or SHA1 formats handle detecting corruption and PAR2 can not only detect but also repair files. Hell, PAR2 can even split and reassemble files when needed (though it is NEVER needed, since every protocol in use today either transfers things in chunks no matter what (BitTorrent, Usenet) or supports retrieving arbitrary portions of a file (FTP, HTTP) to retry a damaged chunk.
Basically there is absolutely z
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You should read the license of the software you download. You can only use it legally for 40 days.
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It is if you're a Linux distributer, and you want to include the archiver as a standard package.
Also, with the source code available, you could modify the archiver. For instance, you could make/modify an open media player with the capability of automatically downloading Usenet archives, unpacking those, and playing the media file.