If you download videos with BitTorrent, you've probably come across a few that are compressed inside an RAR file, which can be a bit of a pain. It turns out, however, that you can easily watch RAR-compressed videos in VLC without extracting them.
While you can always extract the RAR and just watch the original video file, this can be handy if you want to keep seeding the original file (and don't want to take up extra space extracting the video). It's also nice if your video doesn't quite fit on a flash drive, since RAR files do a pretty fantastic job at compressing them. To play an RAR-compressed video, just start up VLC, go to Open > File, and select the RAR file. It should open and play as if it were just a video. This also works with videos spread over multiple RAR files, but you'll need the first and last part of the file completely downloaded.
It's not an earth-shattering discovery, but if you're ever in a situation where you have a video in an RAR file and don't want to uncompress it, it's nice that you can just pop it into VLC. Hit the link to read more.
How to Play Movies from Inside RAR Archives Without Extracting Them | CometForums via Reddit