A quick way to open a URL in QuickTime Player

Jun 07, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: lsequeir

I regularly listen to the Internet broadcast of a local radio station. To get it, I have to go their website, and then click on a button to open the online broadcast. It is in a Windows Media Player format. QuickTime Player opens and starts streaming.

Here is how I got to access it by just double-clicking an icon on the Desktop.

The 'obvious' way would be to drag the URL to the Desktop and create a .webloc file. But there were two problems with that.

The URL starts with mms:// and if one tries to open it directly from inside QuickTime Player, it does not recognize it. It does, however, open and play the stream if I use http:// instead.

However, the corresponding .webloc opens in Safari (or whatever other default browser is set), and doing Get Info and setting it to open with QuickTime Player has no effect.

Enter AppleScript. I created a very small script (you need to put in your correct URL):

tell Application "QuickTime Player"
  open URL "http://the.url.for.the.stream"
end tell
I saved this script as an application to my Desktop. Now I just have to double-click and QuickTime Player starts playing the stream.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. I'm pretty sure you still need to have the Windows Media Components for QuickTime, aka Flip4Mac, installed to play Windows Media formats.]

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