RAR File Player
The first thing you need to understand is that .rar files are not multimedia files, so you usually can’t play them right away. A RAR file is an archive, just like .zip or .tar, that can contain one or more compressed files. You can “extract” those files from the .rar archive and play them in your favorite music/video player.
Extracting And Playing RAR Files
The most popular software for extracting RAR files is WinRAR, a shareware application (see the bottom of this article for free alternatives). If you have WinRar installed, you can play .rar files by performing these steps :
- Right-click the file in question.
- Choose “Extract Here”. This will put all the contents of the archive file in the same folder as the .rar file.
- Now you have a video file that you can play in any video player that can handle broken files. Windows Media Player isn’t always able to do this – I personally recommend the free VLC media player for this task.
Here’s an extra tip – sometimes the VLC player can play RAR files right away, without extracting them first. This depends on the video codec and the compression algorithm used, so it may not work in certain cases.
