Save non-streaming QuickTime movies from Safari

Oct 06, '03 09:46:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

A friend asked me if she could save a QuickTime movie from the web to her desktop, even though the "Save As" option was greyed out.

I thought it would work if she found the movie's URL and opened it from within the QuickTime application itself. Finding the URL for a movie on a webpage is not too hard. Using Safari or IE, open the page that contains the movie and pull down the View menu, where you'll find "View Source." Search that page for ".mov". That text string will likely be at the end of a web address in quotes. Copy that entire address, minus the quote marks.

We then pasted that address into QuickTime's "Open URL" dialogue and opened the movie in its own window. But without QT Pro, you still don't get an option to save it.

Just for kicks, we tried opening the URL in a new Safari window. After the entire movie loaded, we could save it under Safari's File menu. I don't know if this works in IE, but it's a great workaround for downloading movies that are meant to be streamed.

[robg's update: I changed the title, as it originally referred to streaming. As the comments clearly note, I screwed up in not changing this when I posted the original article.]

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