RAR is a proprietary format... there is no free-software code to decompress RAR archives (the license agreement for the code that is available prohibits using the code to 'reverse engineer' the RAR format itself, and I'm guessing most projects don't want to have to change their license agreement to a non-free-software license to be able to include RAR support).
Not sure why anyone actually uses RAR these days...I really don't get it.
I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or continue using Kodi which is my current solution.
I don't think the license is the issue, Kodi has solved it with a external dep if i'm not mistaken. The reason is more related to your last sentence. They don't get it, and thus doesn't want to spend time on solving it. Which is their prerogative of course, but it still annoys _me_ :)
> I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or continue using Kodi which is my current solution.
I don't understand why you'd want to keep media files in .rar, unless you are part of scene distribution.
It's not like ROM emulation, where there's tangible savings to be had storing the individual ROMs in a compressed format.
Well, for the longest time, like a decade+, there was no point to spend the time unpacking the files. I could watch them with unrar| mplayer without any problems. Then XBMC came along and everything continued to work without a hitch, it isn't until now the need to unpack them has actually presented itself so i of course see this as a step back and degradation in my personal user experience.
But i guess times are changing, kids these days etc. :)
I think the problem with these products is that they build on the assumptions a file is a file and not that a folder can be a file and a file can be a folder.
The assumptions you need to do to make a folder into a file requires a lot of extra work.
An example of a folder that is actually a file could be a folder named "A Good Movie" with a bunch of .rar files in it.
I've built a streaming plugin for deluge that tries to work around these assumptions but only for a playback scenario and not an indexing scenario. That allows streaming of multi-rar file torrents.
There's also the problem that many rar parsing libraries reads the beginning and end of each part of a split .rar file. That can cause a lot of latency with e.g. 100 files.
Edit: all this applies only to rar files with no compression. With compression you can't do much with regards to seeking and whatnot.
It annoys me to no end. Kodi has had support for ages (back in the XBMC-days) but the feature-request and bountys seems to fall on deaf ears.
Other than that i've found the meta-data to be "better" in emby/jellfin compared to Kodi.