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)
Re:Seems like the distributor needs to be slapped (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
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: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)
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.