Why, for the love of all that is, are files still packed in .r01 etc files?!

[Curll]

For fuck's sake, this is an antiquated technique used for 28.8 and 56k dial up connections for warez sites. Because downloading a 200mb file was pure hell, but twenty 10mb files were okay because if you got a phone call that your grandpa was dying, you could just resume the download from the last file after the funeral (or FUNneral, amirite? He was a racist fuck)
 
But, here we are in 2014. And I'm tryin'ta download some fuckin' pirated TV show and lo and behold, the torrent is just a bunch of stupid .r01 files and shit. It have to take, like, 45 seconds for 7z to cobble together the video file before I can watch it on my HDTV.
 
Gah.
 
Why? 
 
Then, of course, I've got to fuckin' delete the stupid files that I extracted from. Double the diskspace, quadruple my effort/work. Fuckin' bullshit. Just give me the fuckin' video file, asshole pirate dude.
 
So, how's your day going?

 

[Frank Fenway]

Oh god this brought me back. And splitting movies into two 700 mb files. 

 

[SumnerH]

For fuck's sake, this is an antiquated technique used for 28.8 and 56k dial up connections for warez sites. Because downloading a 200mb file was pure hell, but twenty 10mb files were okay because if you got a phone call that your grandpa was dying, you could just resume the download from the last file after the funeral (or FUNneral, amirite? He was a racist fuck)

Lots of the file-sharing sites that warez get traded on (things like hotfile and megaupload, but that haven't been shut down) have maximum file sizes on them. Nowadays that's usually 1GB (sometimes 2GB), but until fairly recently 500 or even 200 MB wasn't unusual, and some of the faster sites (mediafire, zippyshare) still have that kind of limit. So you'll see things split down to those sizes to get around the limits.

 

[krobe]

You don't need to bother extracting it, a lot of media players will play the files directly (xbmc, vlc, mpc-hc, etc)

 

[AlNipper49]

For fuck's sake, this is an antiquated technique used for 28.8 and 56k dial up connections for warez sites. Because downloading a 200mb file was pure hell, but twenty 10mb files were okay because if you got a phone call that your grandpa was dying, you could just resume the download from the last file after the funeral (or FUNneral, amirite? He was a racist fuck)
 
But, here we are in 2014. And I'm tryin'ta download some fuckin' pirated TV show and lo and behold, the torrent is just a bunch of stupid .r01 files and shit. It have to take, like, 45 seconds for 7z to cobble together the video file before I can watch it on my HDTV.
 
Gah.
 
Why? 
 
Then, of course, I've got to fuckin' delete the stupid files that I extracted from. Double the diskspace, quadruple my effort/work. Fuckin' bullshit. Just give me the fuckin' video file, asshole pirate dude.
 
So, how's your day going?

 
Couch Potato feed into SABNZBD using Plex to library them (or anything that supports playing stacked media files) has been the special sauce that worked best for me.  

 

[The_Powa_of_Seiji_Ozawa]

Another reason why people still do this is that some file sharing sites have a rewards system for the uploaders based on the number of clicks and downloads they generate, so splitting a 200 MB file into ten 20 MB .r01 files would get them more rewards by turning 1 download into 10 downloads.