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Save streaming QuickTime movies from Safari
Authored by: xteph on Oct 06, '03 01:14:11PM

This hint has nothing to do with streaming. Au contraire:

Streaming content can't be saved at all, but progressive content can. That's why Apple added some extra's to the QuickTime file format and to the QuickTime plug-in embed code.

If an author of a webpage doesn't want you to save a movie he/she can disable saving in the embed tag.

This hint helps bypassing this by scooping the source page for the direct http url of the movie. Some webpage authors use perl or php to obfuscate the url of the movie even further, so you'll need a network sniffer) try tcp dump in the command line) to find out the URL.

You can also enable caching in the QuickTime preferences and look for the .mov file somewhere on your harddrive, I bet there's already another hint about this subject.

If an author of a quicktime movie doesn't want QuickTime Pro users to save the movie he/she can disable saving using authoring software. Happens a lot with enhanced trailers. So even if you could manage to save the file, you can't strip the extra's and save the plain movie.

About streaming:
If a QuickTime movie is hosted on a streaming server, the URL starts with rtsp://, not http://. Sometimes a reference movie is used which points to the rtsp:// url but itself resides on a webserver, so it's got a http:// url of it's own. If you save this movie, all you end up with is this ref movie (a few Kbytes) instead of the original movie. Yes, you could play or email this reference movie but you'll never physically have the content on your harddisk.

Some people have written rtsp savers in the past: small applications that pretend to be a streaming client but instead of sending the content to the screen, these apps write the content to disk and try to build a new file from the stream. Your mileage may vary. I haven't seen modern versions of these hacks, but try google if you're desperate :-)

Stef



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