Monday, November 20, 2006
FOX Streams Unaired Episodes of Vanished; Is Downloading Possible?
FOX has decided to put the remaining four unaired episodes of its kidnapping drama, Vanished, online. Using a proprietary media player to stream the video, the video quality is a good deal better than the current crop that uses Flash. Through a partnership with Move Networks, shows can be delivered as broadcast-quality streams. Although Flash is entrenched as the default streaming video solution, I see a great deal of potential in Move's technology.The video is cleverly streamed in 200KB packets to your computer, one after another, so the quality is very consistent. It looks like each episode is broken up into hundreds or thousands of QSS files with a master QMX file indexing the playback of the QSS files. A simple packet sniffer is enough to get the URLs. A sample URL is:
http://move-od-540.vo.llnwd.net/qmplive06/foxvod/vanished/vanished1amb09/
15BBAB4B372C2F4CAEDD326089C4D9D9_0300000004.qss
I imagine enterprising minds are already trying to figure out a way to capture the QSS files and put them back together again.
Other FOX shows including The OC, Prison Break, and Bones are also available.
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