How do I watch movies that are still in RAR format?

.RAR is a type of compression software. You will need to uncompress it. The latest version of winzip uncompress your rar files (http://www.winzip.com).

I know you need to extract them—I’m asking if there is a way to watch them without extracting them.

no. It takes all of 1 – 2 minutes to extract. What’s the big deal?

It’s just one less step needed, and often it takes longer than just a minute (several!). Xbox Media Center can play directly from RARs, for example.

But XMC extracts it, that’s the whole point.

IZArc. is a good choice (and free).

Yeah, the video file must be extracted before being played. Xbox Media Center just does it for you behind the scenes. However, if you are using WinRar to unrar the files, you could do it faster. 7Zip is an extremely fast, open source program that can handle zip, rar, tar.gz, and basically every kind of compressed file you can think of, and it does it very quickly.

Yeah IZArc seems nice program.