In case you’ve tried to upgrade your XBMC application using the official repositories from “team-xbmc” you may have already noticed that the rar support was disabled. This means that you won’t be able to play movies or open subtitles without extracting it first.

You have two options to fix this issue:

a) You compile the source code and enable the non free features.

b) You use a precompiled version made by someone else.

Fortunately there are good news for those who want option b.  A guy named Nathan runs a repository where you can download XBMC with these features enabled. Just add his repository to your sources list and you are ready to go.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nathan-renniewaldock

apt-get install xbmc

 

You can also manually check out his repository here.

Have fun! 🙂