Why are torrents still packed as rar?

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mohammad

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I don't know why this happens so much, but it seems like a lot of torrents are packed as rar files. Why is this? This was useful back in the 90's with dial up and IRC/FTP, when you could lose connection at any time and lose a 700mb file, but in the modern age of high speed internet and bittorrent with built in error checking and resuming, this is way past redundant. Using rar hurts torrents because people (me included) will stop seeding early because the stupid rar files take up an extra 20gb of space per torrent. Using rar for something like an iso is a waste because you need to download the whole thing anyways and it is also stupid for mp3 because you can't pick what you want ahead of time. Can anyone justify the use of rar?
 
It's sometimes useful to pack multiple files into one. But I agree with you, in most cases it's a waste. The beauty of BitTorrent is that you can choose to only download files you want. BitTorrent is such an efficient way to transfer data that if you go looking for a song you'll often find the artist's full discography. You can choose to download it all, just some albums, or just the song you came for. Rars make this impossible. The worst is a movie, just a single .avi, inside a .rar. WTF? Some think you save space by "compressing" the files in a .rar. Only certain files can be compressed a significant amount, and these aren't the type you'll find on BitTorrent. Audio and video files can't be compressed much without compromising quality. Executable files are normally already compressed and can't be compressed further. I agree with you.
 
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