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About: PAR2Lib

From the PAR2Lib site:


" PAR2Lib is a library to handle PAR2 files, providing the functionality to check and, if necessary, repair files. It's design is streamlined for use in newsreaders, and works 'incrementally'. This also means that a newsreader using this library can make queueing decisions based on calls to this library: Do we actually need more than the smallest PAR2 file to get the full binary? If we do, how much do we need? This library will provide the answers. Also, the library doesn't need to have any physical files, anything can be done through memory; whatever the main application designer prefers and/or the situation demands."


As far as I know, this is the only PAR2 decoder/repairer not based on the original parchive code, and its used by several free tools around the internet.

The last official release - 0.7 - dates from 2007, however there is a development build available directly from me sporting a lot of new features and fixes.

Among other things it now uses hand-optimized assembler for x86 and x86-64, with MMX/SSE optimizations if available. Multi-threaded and multi-core support is now also available. Various compilers have been tested and binaries are available (and tested) for both Win32 and LinuxAMD64, and Linux32 untested.

It has been benchmarked against the original par2 (parchive), par2+tbb, and QuickPar. The results of these benchmarks is that for checking/verification PAR2Lib is the absolute champion, but for actual repair of very large files with a large number of missing blocks, it comes in a close second with par2+tbb being the winner.

The official PAR2Lib website is here, though some of the information mentioned here is not available there yet.