General:
As noted in the original hint, the first thing to do is to make sure that "Save movies in disk cache" has been activated. This is accomplished by opening System Preferences, then clicking on the QuickTime icon. Next, check "Save movies in disk cache," then close System Preferences. You will only need to do this once. From now on, it will continue to cache the QT files.
Read the rest of the hint for the remainder of the how-to...
[robg adds: Go to Folder isn't new with Panther, so this revised non-UNIX method should work just fine in previous OS X releases.]
Step 1:
Using any web browser (I tested this using Safari), play a QuickTime movie from a website that typically does not allow you to save the movie. This will place a cached copy of the QT movie in the folder /tmp/501/TemporaryItems/.
Step 2:
Switch to the Finder. Under the Go menu, you will see "Go to Folder...". A dialog box opens that asks you to enter the path name to the folder you want to go to. Type in /tmp/501/TemporaryItems/. The Finder will present you with a window showing all of the files that are temporarily stored in this folder. Typically, you can't see this folder without using UNIX commands via Terminal.
Step 3:
Look thru the files until you find one that starts with the name "QTPluginTemp". It will have bunch of other random numbers and letters in the name -- just ignore those. For the sake of this example, let's call this file: "QTPluginTemp3763600". So now:
- Move (or copy) the file to any folder you like. I have one called "Downloads" that I use.
- Click on the file and press the "Enter" key so you can rename it.
- Rename the file to MyMovie.mov (you can use replace MyMovie with any text that you like, but the .mov part is critical!)
- Click Enter again to make the new name stick
- A warning box will pop up asking "Are you sure you want to add the extension ".mov" to the end of the name?" Then it goes on to explain all of the scary things that could happen if you do this. Take a chance! Click "Add."
Notice that Panther not only renamed the file to MyMovie.mov, it also automatically changed the icon and made the default application to be QuickTime Player! So all you have to do now is get the popcorn, double click the file and watch the movie! No muss, no fuss and no UNIX code!
If you download QT movies a lot, then another time saver would be to make an alias to the "TemporaryItems" folder so that you don't have to do Step 2 every time. For the really fancy among you, you could write an AppleScript, and attach it to the "TemporaryItems" folder using FolderActions, that would look for new files that start with "QTPluginTemp" and automatically move them to a special folder for later processing of Step 3. Heck, if you are really adventurous, you could write an AppleScript, that performs Step 3, then Step 2 and you would never have to touch the file at all! But this exercise is left to the reader. Don't you just hate that?!
Good luck!

