vlc cannot play video files inside rar

I have a .rar file and it contains some video files.

When I open the rar and then try to open the video files from there directly it fires up vlc but vlc throws this error

VLC is unable to open the MRL 'file:///tmp/

However vlc works fine when I first extract it first and then open it.

Solution 1:

Just unpack the .rar file. There is zero benefit of packing any modern video format into any compressed archive format, no matter if it's .rar, .zip or whatever. Videos are already compressed; chances are that the resulting .rar is even larger than the original file (because of management overhead like the .rar file header).

What 7zip probably does on Windows is it unpacks that file to a temporary file, runs vlc on it and then deletes that temporary file. And it does that over and over again for each time you click on the file.

So simply do it once and be done with it (and you can delete the .rar file after you unpacked it).