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Unarchiver Provides LGPL RARv3 Extraction Tool
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."
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.
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
pirates have traditionally favored rar.
Your hearing may be faulty. Pirates have traditionally favored har and yarr!