?Well, this isn't really a recording or even audio post today. In fact, the only reason I'm putting it up at all is because of the severe anguish that I went through in order to open an hdtv file we downloaded.

Here's the deal. My girlfriend missed some stupid tv show about some crazy doctor called “House”. I would never watch a TV show named “House” ever on principal alone. Either way, she asked me if there was any way to watch it.

The next morning, I had a copy of Season 3, Episode 3 sitting in my downloaded folder. I was excited because this would be enough brownie points that I could be a complete jerk the rest of the week. This excited me!!

Well, it turns out there were well over 20 14MB files in the folder. (Of course one of my eyebrows shot downward). This was not what I had expected. What was even more odd was the file type changed. It ascended for each file. I guess this was a way of keeping track of the order of the video files. The extension was “.r02”, “.r03”, “.r04” etc. This made it tough to search online and figure out how to do this.

Well, I did some research. I have to say that I REALLY hate dealing with the consumer side of the internet. I'm used to hanging out on webmaster forums and recording forums were active people attempt to create things on a daily basis. I found that it was 10 billion times harder getting answers to simple question from the mindless consumers. I may sound like an elitist, but if you had went through I did just to get a stupid TV show for my girlfriend, you'd feel like the world was a rotting carcass too.

Okay, so how did I get “House S03E03” to play?

Well, it turns out that those stupid “r03” extensions are part of a .RAR file. .RAR files are just like .zip files but, of course, Windows doesn't open those by default. So, I used my trusty open source rar utility, 7-Zip.

It turns out that my not so attentive brain didn't notice that there was one file in the folder that was a little different than the rest of the bunch. While I thought all the files ended with “r01” or “r02”, it turns out that one of those files ended with “.rar”.

All I had to do was unrar the file ending with .rar. Somehow, all 20 something files were now joined together to create a 360 MB file that would opened just fine on my PC. If you have troubles passed this point, you are probably dealing with a codec issue and I refuse to open that can of worms on a recording website!