SageTV + RAR Files

[skyfox]

Hey guys,

Is there anyway to have SageTV play RAR files like xbmc does? It can play them like normal files, hardly any delay at all.

Or any plug ins to offer this functionality?

Thanks!!

- Brian

[Taddeusz]

What would be the point? Other than putting a bunch of files together in a single file I don't understand why this would be desirable. Just by their nature lossy compressed video such as MPEG2 and H.264 as well as lossy audio such as MP3, AAC, and AC3 are already highly compressed and derive very little advantage from being compressed again.

So, why?

[Fuzzy]

To skip a step when pirating content would be my guess.. :-/

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

To skip a step when pirating content would be my guess.. :-/

That's my guess also, cheap and lazy. Too cheap to buy the content, and too lazy to uncompress a file. The other "reason" is that they can split the video into small chunks for big files that won't fit on FAT32 drives. But still, really?

And the way XMBC works, it can't play compressed RARs, just RARs where there is no compression, so the RAR acts like a container.

[skyfox]

I'm only asking if it can be done.

Self created content.
Split into rars for easy transport over the internet.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by skyfox

I'm only asking if it can be done.

Self created content.
Split into rars for easy transport over the internet.

Not now, but if it can be done in XBMC, then I'm confident it can be done in SageTV. Someone just needs to put the effort into making it happen.

[Taddeusz]

I'm not sure it could be done in the same way that XBMC does. Apparently they wrote a special virtual file system driver that is able to use RAR as a container for the vfs. Basically it treats each RAR file or file set as its own file system. Seems kind of arcane to me. To me this seems like kind of WTF. Media on a FAT file system, really? And if it's something you've created yourself and distributing wouldn't that only be one time thing even if you're dropping it on a web server? I suppose I just don't understand the point of its utility.

[skyfox]

Thanks for the feedback.

Sounds overly difficult vs gains. (md5 hash and encryption)