10.4: Yet another Safari/QuickTime save movie tip

Jun 02, '05 10:01:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Tiger only hintSince upgrading to Tiger, I've been unable to save QuickTime movies from Safari after watching them -- they appear as a 4KB movie file in the Finder, regardless of the movie's actual size. Saving the same movie from Safari in Panther (10.3.9) works correctly. However, I don't really want to use Panther every time I want to download a QuickTime movie, and I don't want to launch another browser.

One solution is to paste the movie URL into a Terminal window, preceded by curl, and followed by > filename. This will transfer the data at the URL (i.e. the movie) to the file filename. This is still a little cumbersome, so I wrote an AppleScript called CurlSafari to do it for me.

CurlSafari gets the URL of the frontmost Safari window, asks you for a filename, and then opens a Terminal window and transfers the data at that URL to ~/filename using the curl command. Putting a full path in as the filename does not create a file at that path, but instead creates a file in your home directory with the full path as the filename. If someone knows how to invoke a traditional 'Save' dialog in AppleScript, feel free to modify the script (and let me know how you did it!).

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one...]

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