[X4U] Save .mov files

[Nick Scalise]

On Tuesday, April 26, 2005, at 06:35AM, Eugene <list-themacintoshguy at fsck.net> wrote:

>On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 05:51:10AM CDT, Peter Krug <pkrug at mac.com> wrote:
>: On Apr 25, 2005, at 11:00 PM, Neil wrote:
>: >on 7/8/04 10:51 AM, Peter Krug wrote:
>: >
>: >>I searched in the finder for Visible and Invisible items, Modified
>: >>today, greater than 300 kb.  I got a file called 47D7A76Cd01 that
>: >>was in my Camino cache folder.  I renamed it .mov and launched it in
>: >>QT player.  It worked!!
>: >
>: >I did the same thing to find the files in my Firefox cache, but when
>: >I tried to open them in QT, I got an error message that the files
>: >were not in a format that QT understands.  That's strange because I
>: >saw them play in QT when it streamed.  Does anybody have any idea how
>: >to get at those files?
>: 
>: I see this with many movie files, especially music videos from band 
>: websites.  I think they have encoded the movie with something special 
>: to make it only work from their website.  One thing I and others have 
>: suggested is to view the page source and search for ".mov".  If there 
>: is a direct link to the movie, that's the easiest way to grab it when 
>: it fails out of the cache.  But not all movie downloads work this way 
>: either.
>
>AFAIK, there is no special encoding that makes a QuickTime movie
>playable only from the web site.  If you can see in your browser,
>you can save it to your hard drive.  The exception is streamed
>content, which requires other techniques to rip it to a file.

I have saved movies from websites where I had to go into the cache to retrieve them. After I had them all, I tried to splice them together and save the result to a new movie and the movies would still not allow saving - even from within QuickTime Pro.

Additionally, I tried converting them to mpeg1 and that did not work either. 

So, there must be something that allows content creators to disable saving, although I could not find any documentation after about 5 minutes of searching at Apple's site.

--
Nick Scalise
nickscalise at mac.com