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"How do I play .bin, .cue, .dat and .rar movie files?"

By Paul Gil, About.com

Question: "How do I play .bin, .cue, .dat and .rar movie files?"

November, 2008

OK, so you're a Bittorrent, WinMX, eXeem or Shareaza file user. After 19 hours of anxious anticipation, you’ve finally downloaded that .rar and .bin/cue or .dat/.cue movie file you’ve been dying to watch. You open your file explorer, locate the download, and double click on the file.

Your movie file doesn’t launch!

So, what steps did you miss? What procedure will let you watch that movie in its .bin, .cue, .dat and .rar file formats?


Answer: The answer is about three steps and five tools:

  1. WinRAR decompression software will expand the .rar “archive” into full usable format on your drive.

  2. “CD/DVD emulator” software will translate the bin, dat, and cue movie files to be a virtual CD-DVD optical drive.

  3. One of three special movie players will be used to view the actual movie itself.


Next: see the exact how-to procedure here...
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