Preview video clips while downloading

I guess there is hardly anything more annoying than downloading several hundred megs of a video and then find out that it wasn't worth it.

Here is the solution. I am entirely referring to firefox. For those among you who are still using M$IE do yourself a favour and go to Mozilla to get a *real* browser.

There are two ways to start a download. Either you do a left click on a link (eg: dead link or you do an <ALT>-LeftClick. A left click on a link will bring up a download dialog which will create two files on your computer. One is blahblah.rar and the other is blahbla.rar.part. The latter actually holds the data, while the first is just a placeholder. When the download is finished all the data from blahblah.rar.part will be *put* into blahblah.rar. <ALT>-LeftClick omits the part file. The data are downloaded into blahbla.rar directly.

And here comes the trick. After downloading a couple of megs copy the file which holds the data without interrupting the download.
If it is a rar file, open it with winrar click on "Extract to", tick the box "Keep broken files", extract the video and ignore all the warnings.
Now you have a *corrupted* video file which you can watch in your preferred media player. Since the one which comes with windows is crap, i recommmend using media player classic which can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/

This trick works with the following extensions:
.rar
.avi
.mpg (and .mpeg)
.wmv
.asf

It also works with .001 files if the original file has one of the above extensions.

it works sometimes with:
.mov

and it definitely does not work with:
.zip

Since i am a lazy bastard and do not want to click too often i came up with this tweak:
The idea is to right click on a .rar or a .part file while it is downloading, choose a menu point, et voila, you have the content of the rar file on your disk.

This has been tested with windows 2000 and WinRar 3.70.

create a batch file (eg. a.bat or b.bat ...) and add the following lines

Code:

@echo off set target=%SYSTEMROOT%\preview.bat echo @echo off > %target% echo copy %%1 tmp.part >> %target% echo "%ProgramFiles%\WinRAR\WinRAR.exe" e -inul -kb tmp.part >> %target% echo del tmp.part >> %target%

once done, run it. Go to your system folder (eg: c:\win, C:\WINNT or c:\WINDOWs) and open the file "preview.bat" in notepad. It should look like this:

Code:

@echo off  copy %1 tmp.part  "C:\Programme\WinRAR\WinRAR.exe" e -inul -kb tmp.part  del tmp.part

the line "C:\Programme\WinRAR\WinRAR.exe" (Which might look different, if you are not on a german Windows) has to point to your winrar.exe file. Change it if necessary. If your path to winrar contains spaces make sure there are quotes around the whole thing as in the example above.

Next create a registry file (eg a.reg or b.reg ...) and add the following lines

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.part] @="WinRAR" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WinRAR\shell\Preview] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WinRAR\shell\Preview\command] @="preview.bat \"%1\""

once done, run it and answer the dialog box with "Yes" or the like.

You should now see the menu point "Preview" when you do a right click on a rar or a part file. Using it only makes sense on a partially downloaded rarfile while download is still in progress. And it only works on the first file of a multipart rar set.

Any questions?

Enjoy

Interesting post...

Yes IE is the poo and can't do this trick.

But v7 seems to be the most stable version ever... and I'm happy enough with it.

This little trick whilst interesting, isn't enough to get me to switch..

There is a IE way to preview partial RS downloads...

Turn off your modem. The download times out and puts whatever you've downloaded so far into the folder. It won't be a complete file - but at least you can see what's in there. Of course - you can't then resume the file, so you'd have to start again if it turns out you did want the file

I cannot tell about v7. The last version i know is v5.5 and i didn't touch M$IE ever since. And im pretty sure i will never touch it in the future, since privacy and security is quite important to me