pbzip2 produces a separate bzip2 stream for every compressed block, which can't be read properly by many popular decoders, usually ones that are based around th

pbzip2 produces a separate bzip2 stream for every compressed block, which can't be read properly by many popular decoders, usually ones that are based around the bzip2 high-level interface [0]. There's a warning about this in Python 2's documentation, which is a better offering than most [1]. Many decoders simply stop reading after decompressing the first 900k without so much as a peep that something that may astonish you has happened. [0] http://www.bzip.org/1.0.5/bzip2-manual-1.0.5.html#hl-interface [1] https://docs.python.org/2/library/bz2.html#bz2.BZ2File