NOTE: This 2020 draft blog post is being published in 2022; it may be incomplete and the information is certainly out of date.
.zip Download and macOS
The problem is that macOS Archive Utility doesn't like large zip files.
You might wonder how to access Archive Utility from the Applications directory; the answer is that you can't. Archive Utility is a core service; in macOS 10.15.3 it's in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Archive Utility.app (you can access it e.g. using Finder Go - Go to folder... )
Regardless of whether you activate Archive Utility by double-clicking the .zip file or by opening the application and selecting File - Expand Archive... you will get the same error for a large file:
Error 79 - Inappropriate file type or format.
This is unfortunate, because your Mac actually can unzip the file, you just need to use the Terminal.
Here's where you may encounter the next problem.
If you are an admin user
If you're an admin user, then there shouldn't be any problem.
Go to the Terminal, go to the directory (probably ~/Downloads/ ) and then just
unzip filename.zip
That's it. Unzip can expand large files no problem; it won't throw an error.
If you are not an admin user (a "Standard" user)
This is complicated because macOS 10.15 has really strict limitations at multiple levels on what you can do. Basically you shouldn't try to do this from a non-admin account.
First of all, you can't sudo because your account by default is not in /etc/sudoers
Second of all, you can't do Terminal actions in ~/Downloads/ anyway, because it's a protected directory for Terminal. You'll get a popup about access. (There's no use moving the file to Documents, that's also a protected directory for Terminal.)
Then you have to consider whether you want to maintain a bunch of System Preferences... Security & Privacy - Privacy - Files and Folders exceptions for Terminal.
Probably the easiest thing to do is to give yourself the exception, unzip the file, and then remove the exception.
That's a lot just to be able to unzip a file.
In macOS 10.15.3 there are access restrictions for non-admin users. So if you're a Standard (non-admin) user and you go into Terminal and try to do ls or unzip, it won't work. You'd have to change the file access restrictions in System Preferences, which you may not want to do.
If you have the ability to switch to being an admin user though, it will work fine.
Specific Example - Exhibitions on Screen
You can download Exhibitions on Screen shows; they are tours of art galleries plus historical information about the exhibit and the artists and interviews with gallery curators and art experts.
http://www.seventh-art.com/product-category/exhibition-on-screen-2/
They normally also screen in cinemas but not so much these days.
The videos are available to purchase as DVD, download or streaming. If you purchase streaming you get 14 days of access.
All pricing is in Pounds. A download is £5.99 (approx CAD$10) and streaming is £3.99 (approx CAD$7). I haven't tested streaming yet. If you have macOS and are a non-technical user, you probably don't want to get the download, as I will explain below.
The download will be an approximately 2.5GB zip file. This is perhaps more for file integrity than for compression as the MP4 file the zip contains is already highly compressed (there's barely any difference between the zip file size and the MP4 size).
Once unzipped, the file will play no problem in QuickTime Player (just doubleclick the MP4 file).
But you will have to use the above techniques to unzip this large file, at least in macOS 10.15
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