Instead, allow reading 2KB only. This seems to be sufficient for
libarchive to recognize zip, 7z, rar, tar. Good enough.
This is implemented by creating an in-memory stream with a copy of
the file header. If libarchive succeeds opening this, the actual
stream is opened.
Allowing unlimited reading could break unseekable streams, such as
playing from http servers with no range request support or pipes.
Also, we try not to read too much data in the first probe pass. Some
slow network streams like shoutcast services could make probing much
slower if we allow it to read too much. In the second probing pass,
actually allow 200KB.
Things like .gz etc., which have no real file header. A mixed bag,
because it e.g. tends to misdetect mp3 files as compressed files or
something (of course it has no mp3 support - I don't know as what it
detects them). But requested by someone (or maybe not, I'm not sure
how to interpret that).
This works similar to the existing .rar support, but uses libarchive.
libarchive supports a number of formats, including zip and (most of)
rar.
Unfortunately, seeking does not work too well. Most libarchive readers
do not support seeking, so it's emulated by skipping data until the
target position. On backwards seek, the file is reopened. This works
fine on a local machine (and if the file is not too large), but will
perform not so well over network connection.
This is disabled by default for now. One reason is that we try
libarchive on every file we open, before trying libavformat, and I'm not
sure if I trust libarchive that much yet. Another reason is that this
breaks multivolume rar support. While libarchive supports seeking in
rar, and (probably) supports multivolume archive, our support of
libarchive (probably) does not. I don't care about multivolume rar, but
vocal users do.
wm4
Kevin Mitchell