VLC - Open an audio or video file within an incomplete (zip) archive

You may have an incomplete zip file that has an audio or video file within it that you would like to preview. For instance you you may want to preview a file that is being downloaded.

First list the contents of the archive to find out the file name within it:
7z l <archive file>

Then pipe the extracted data directly to VLC (the dash is for standard in):
7z e -so <archive file> <file in archive file> | vlc -

Note that unzip should also be usable, but it does not seem to work with incomplete archive files.

To use unzip with complete archive files:
unzip -c <archive file> <file in archive file> | vlc -

Note also that jumping forward from the start of the file does not seem to be possible, so every time you run the above command, then the playback will start from the beginning.