A Broken MKV Inside a RAR

[Hexendoktor]

I downloaded a RAR file containing a video file (MKV) and I can't extract it anywhere because 7zip says it's broken. I am pretty far from a computer wizard so I was hoping somewhere here could offer some advice. Thanks in advance!

[jman98]

There's nothing you can do. When parts of a RAR archive are messed up the only thing that can fix this is if there are PAR recovery files that went along with it. You can often find PAR files on downloads from Usenet but if you downloaded this on Bit Torrent, almost never are PAR recovery files part of the archive. Sorry.

[manono]

Did you already try redownloading it?

[hello_hello]

Where did you download it from and how? Maybe it's some sort of fake.

If you downloaded it with a torrent program there should be a way to get the program to re-check the downloaded file. Utorrent does it via the right click menu (force recheck). If you recheck a torrent and it passes 100% then it won't have been corrupted when downloading. Maybe it was uploaded that way, or it's a fake.

Try extracting it with a different program??

[Constant Gardener]

Set your unarchiver to "keep broken files" - or look for a repack.

[jman98]

Geez guys, I guess you have never seen this, but yes, RAR archives CAN get corrupted. It DOES happen. All you need is to have one guy have a disk drive problem and he will start sharing a corrupted version and then everybody who gets the bad pieces from him is screwed. This really happens. It's not necessarily a fake. It may be, but it can also be a real problem.

Yes, try to download it again. Yes, try another extraction program for sure. If it's a really large torrent like a BD disc, it may be too big for some extractors to handle correctly. But again, RAR torrent files CAN get corrupted. There's a reason why PAR files exist.

[aedipuss]

winrar maybe. there's always the slim chance the person who rar'd up the file to begin with included "recovery record" in which case it may be fixable. otherwise you need par files from the original ok rar'ing to replace the bad parts.

[AlanHK]

I downloaded a RAR file containing a video file (MKV) and I can't extract it anywhere because 7zip says it's broken. I am pretty far from a computer wizard so I was hoping somewhere here could offer some advice. Thanks in advance!

Try Winrar itself. It has a repair option that is worth a try (if the archive was made with a recovery option).

Sometimes you might get such an error if there is a password that you haven't supplied.

Also, there are fake files around in rar files. They just say it's whatever latest movie, but it's just garbage or worse, a virus.

[hello_hello]

Geez guys, I guess you have never seen this, but yes, RAR archives CAN get corrupted. It DOES happen. All you need is to have one guy have a disk drive problem and he will start sharing a corrupted version and then everybody who gets the bad pieces from him is screwed. This really happens. It's not necessarily a fake. It may be, but it can also be a real problem. .

Torrents don't work that way. A person sharing a corrupted file via a torrent won't share bad pieces with others. Same with other file types. Integrity checking is built into the torrent system and a torrent program will check each piece it downloads. Countless times I've seen entries in the utorrent log file to the effect of something such as "piece #xx failed hash check" (I don't have any in the log file at the moment and I can't remember the exact wording). If you run an integrity check on a file you've downloaded using your torrent program and it passes 100% then it's 100% the same as when it was originally uploaded, so unless the original uploader uploaded a corrupted file in the first place..... or it was simply a fake.....

[johns0]

Most likely its a part of a rar set and you need 49 or more rar parts and a par2 set to repair any damaged file(s) as long as the damage doesn't require more par2 than needed.

[hello_hello]

Most likely its a part of a rar set and you need 49 or more rar parts and a par2 set to repair any damaged file(s) as long as the damage doesn't require more par2 than needed.

As the original poster seemed to indicate he downloaded a single rar file, I'd be thinking if that's the case, it points to the likelihood of it being a fake. If video files are uploaded as rar files, usually they're multi-part files. I'm not sure I've ever seen a single rar file containing a video that wasn't fake, at least not when downloading it via a torrent (other sources may be different).

As video can't really be compressed any further by putting it in a rar or zip file etc there's no real reason to do so, unless you want multi-part files so if one's corrupted it's not necessary to download the whole lot again. Although when it comes to torrents even that's obsolete, given torrents have their own integrity checking "built in".