rar browsing not working

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Ghilteras
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Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2021 4:07 pm

rar browsing not working

Post by Ghilteras »

Hey guys, I enabled the archive browsing in the UMS.conf but I cannot see any of my archived content. They are all video files (mkv mostly). I see some error lines in the logs that say

Could not match any format

Is this a known issue? I've attached the logs here
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mik_s
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Re: rar browsing not working

Post by mik_s »

I'm not sure as I have never use that option, but I don't think it will work on multi part Rars.
TBH I don't see the need to keep your video files split in segments like that, I would just extract them.
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Ghilteras
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2021 4:07 pm

Re: rar browsing not working

Post by Ghilteras »

Not that I have to justify this, but ALL the content I have and ALL the content my community presents is archived like that. It's how the overwhelming majority of videos are compressed anyway so I'm actually surprised you think we should just extract them, why? You can just save ton of space like this, plus if I extract them I basically have to keep the original for sharing purposes and use the extracted version to watch it, then I have to delete the extracted version. It's immensely silly.

Kodi plays them just fine archived like this, it's a limit of UMS if it cannot do the same.
Nadahar
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Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2015 5:57 pm

Re: rar browsing not working

Post by Nadahar »

It is a limitation of UMS, that said it's not quite "fair" to compare it to Kodi which just has to play the content itself. All it has to do is read through it sequentially, while UMS as a server must be able to serve any part of the file at any time, per the request of the renderers. That means that you can't just do a sequential read (an extraction) every time you get a new request for a part. It would be insanely slow.

Another problem for UMS is the lack of Java extraction libraries for RAR archives. As far as I know, there's only the one UMS uses available, junrar - which can only handle RAR 4 and older files. Nobody has made a Java library that can handle RAR 5 files that I know, so make sure your RAR files is RAR 4 or earlier. For Kodi this isn't a problem since they can use the "standard" RAR libraries that handles RAR 5 files, because Kodi is running as native code as opposed to under Java.

When those things are said, the archive handling code in UMS is abysmal. It looks to me like somebody made it a long go and was happy when they got the most basic stuff to work. Nobody else cared for it since then, and with time it was more or less forgotten. So, the state of the archive handling (this applies equally to zip, rar and 7zip archives) code is just a disaster that hasn't been updated when things have changed in other parts of the code.

I do agree that having to extract the files to play them is very inconvenient and time consuming. That said, I also think archiving audio and video files are insanely stupid, and especially splitting them like it was 1995. Almost all audio and video codecs are already compressed, and the extra space you can save by RARing them is very little to none (depending on the codec).
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SubJunk
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Re: rar browsing not working

Post by SubJunk »

Like Nadahar said, our main limitation is we are unable to extract RAR 5 since no one has made a Java library for that
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