QuickTime 3.0 Plug-in: Saving movies in web browsers without updating to QuickTime Pro; Setting mime types

When looking at what you get or don't get when you update to QuickTime Pro, most attention has focused on MoviePlayer (see related item today). But there is a similar situation with PictureViewer and QuickTime Plug-in. With the upgrade to Pro, you can export pictures in PictureViewer (with the basic version, you can only view them). With the upgrade to Pro, QuickTime Plug-in 2.0 (which comes with QuickTime 3.0) allows you to save movies from web pages to your disk. This was a feature, available in the previous 1.1.1 version of QuickTime Plug-in, that was stripped out of the basic QuickTime 3.0 version.

However, Jim Carr discovered a way to save a movie even when using the basic QuickTime Plug-in 2.0:

1. Click on movie screen and hold. You will get an Options dialog. While it no longer offers to let you save the movie, there is still a choice for plug-in settings. One is "Save movie in disk cache." Check it.
2. Now go to where you have your cache files stored and find the cache file that represents your saved move. Move it to your desktop (to prevent it from getting purged at some later point). That's it. You have the movie!

Jim offers this tip on how to locate the exact file your want: "I did a View as List and Arrange by Size and the file <cache408975.mov> file popped to top. You can also sort by Kind if your mime types are set properly. It saves the file in cache as a MoviePlayer document."

A QuickTime Plug-in glitch and solution A reader reports that "since installing the new 2.0 Plug-in, all QTVR movies appear as broken icons in my browsers. It appears that the Plug-in did not set all the mime types and suffixes correctly. Manually configuring these, as per instructions on Apple's QuickTime Plug-in site fixed the problem."