What is WinRar and how do I use it?

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What is WinRar and how do I use it?

Hi: I have an iMac with Leopard OSx 10.5. I have been having trouble playing media files downloaded from the internet. I have VLC player which seemed to read many of the files, but neither it nor Quicktime will play any of the video files that I download with Xvid and rar tags on them. I downloaded WinRar but nothing has changed. I don't know what to do with the download - where do I place the files and then how do you activate it so that it will play the video and audio files? Then someone said to download Perian and I did that and I have the same issue of where to put Perian and how to activate it? Then I was told that if I have Perian installed to remove any divx files because Perian already has them. Does this make any sense? I do not have a good understanding of how to use "extra components" to be able to play video and audio files downloaded from the internet. Can someone tell me what additional things I need in order to play the various media files out there?

Thanks for any help.

Message was edited by: booandluna

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.3)

Posted on Jun 22, 2008 9:42 AM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,995 points

Jun 22, 2008 11:37 AM in response to bluebird hill

Files with the .rar extension are actually archived files. Rar is an archive format. I believe WinRAR is a Windows program so it wouldn't work on a Mac. You would need something like UnRarX - VersionTracker or MacUpdate - to de-archive files with the .rar extension. Xvid is a video CoDec that competes with DivX. You can download the plug-in for Quicktime here.

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Answer 2

Jun 22, 2008 3:58 PM in response to bluebird hill

For a decent free unarchiver, checkout The Unarchiver at http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html. You can set it to unpack lots of archives that OS X normally wouldn't touch.

As for video, Perian is a preference pane. It should automatically install upon double-clicking the .prefpane icon.

http://perian.org/ is the official site. I've not had to remove any other formats from my system for it to work fine, and I've got the latest DivX installed too.

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