GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 597450
Playing movie from RAR archive(s)
Last modified: 2014-11-29 15:34:26 UTC
It would be great, if totem could play files stored in RAR archive (multiple archives/passworded), like VLC does [1]. one way could be through gvfs-mount (mounting the .rar archive as it works now for *.tar.gz or *.tar.bz2) and playing movie from the mounted archive. but there are 2 blocking bugs: no support for RAR in libarchive (gvfs uses that library for mounting archives) [2] playing movie even from supported archive type (*.tar.gz) fails [3] or maybe another way is possible, i don't know how VLC implements this feaure... [1] http://sinaisix.blogspot.com/2009/10/7-cool-vlc-features-worth-knowing.html "3. Play RAR files" [2] http://code.google.com/p/libarchive/issues/detail?id=40 [3] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=597448
Totem will be able to do that when libarchive has support for RAR, through gvfs, or when somebody writes a GStreamer plugin for reading from RAR archives. Passing onto GStreamer, although I wouldn't expect them to be that interested in the feature.
One could implement a filter for GStreamer based on VLC's rar stream filter (modules/stream_filter/rar.c in the sources). Or use that same code to implement a libarchive backend.
I think this should be done in libarchive.
according to [0] it's not possible for libarchive to implement this feature. it seems GStreamer guys, that you are our last hope ;) (VLC code responsible for playing from RARs [1]) [0] http://code.google.com/p/libarchive/issues/detail?id=40#c11 [1] http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=blob;f=modules/stream_filter/rar.c
Also related see bug #303975
5 years later, do we really want to keep this open? Sure, it could be done, but..
+1 for closing it. If anyone really needs it and comes up with the patches we can discuss.