How to join wmv.001... files: 7zX and MacHacha

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derekcurrie.deluxe

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Dec 2, 2009, 7:55:06 PM12/2/09
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Over in Windows world there are Windows Media Video files (.WMV). Similar to RAR archives, they frequently show up on the Internet for download in pieces that have to be joined at your end. Here are some example names for the pieces:

ThingIt.wmv.001
ThingIt.wmv.002
ThingIt.wmv.003

So you've downloaded all the pieces. Now what? Oddly, Mac OS X thinks these are RAR archive pieces. No they are NOT. In fact, I had a difficult time finding any expander application that had a clue what to do with these things. Here is what I went through:

StuffIt Expander - FAIL
Archive Utility (built into Mac OS X) - FAIL
The Unarchiver - FAIL
UnRAR X - FAIL
Gumby 50c - FAIL
GUI tar - FAIL

Deciding to throw the kitchen sink at it, I dropped the first file, ThingIt.wmv.001, onto the obscure archiving utility 7zX.app. (7zX is yet-another compression format that was created for UNIX/POSIX, like we need another format). TADA! It knew exactly what these files were and how to join them into one single .WMV playable file. Mystery solved.

I have no idea why this utility understands the .wmv piece files. That there is no extension at the end of the file names is extremely strange for both UNIX and Windows. It's basically unheard of. Meanwhile, of course, the files have no Mac OS file headers to identify their file type. Bizarre. If only there were Internet police.

Digging around on the net I finally found a dedicated utility for this purpose called MacHacha. It knows how to do the splitting and the joining:


MacHacha was recently updated to version 4.0 for Snow Leopard. There is a 64-bit version as well as a Universal 32/64-bit version.

Hope that's useful!

:-Derek




boris_cleto

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Dec 3, 2009, 10:33:12 AM12/3/09
to SMUG Talk
There is also Split&Concat 3.0, MacAppStuff Pieces 1.0, AJoiner 2.2
(Website down), and JigSaw 3.1.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13072
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/10921186
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17123
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22621

On Dec 2, 7:55 pm, "derekcurrie.deluxe" <derekcurrie.del...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> derekcur...@mac.com
> ===================http://Mac-Security.blogspot.comhttp://MacSmarticles.blogspot.com
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