Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Unarchiver Provides LGPL RARv3 Extraction Tool

Posted by timothy on from the ok-now-conquer-the-world dept.

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."

5 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Seems like the distributor needs to be slapped by wagnerrp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why would you use a proprietary format to store openly distributed files?

    1. Re:Seems like the distributor needs to be slapped by gmhowell · · 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.

      --
      Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
  2. Re:Yay piracy! by dougmc · · 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.

  3. Re:Yay piracy! by retchdog · · Score: 4, 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

    --
    "They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
  4. Re:Yay piracy! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    pirates have traditionally favored rar.

    Your hearing may be faulty. Pirates have traditionally favored har and yarr!